ON 

THE TRAIL OF 

STEVENSON 



BOOKS BY 
CLAYTON HAMILTON 

On The Trail of Stevenson $3.00 net 

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EDINBURGH CASTLE — FROM THE GRASSMARKET 



" It was here, of course, that St. Ives was con- 
fined as a prisoner from France; and the reader 
of the novel will probably turn dizzy as he gazes 
down the precipice where the hero dangled him- 
self to freedom by a rope." — Page 17. 



ON THE TRAIL OF 

STEVENSON 

B Y 

CLAYTON HAMILTON 

MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF 
ARTS AND LETTERS 




THE PICTURES FROM DRAWINGS BY 

WALTER HALE 

MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY OF ILLUSTRATORS 



GARDEN CITY 



NEW YORK 



DOUBLEDAY, PAGE AND 
COMPANY . . . . MCMXV 



CK 






COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE AND 
COMPANY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUD- 
ING THAT OF TRANSLATION 
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES 
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 



©CI.A414141 ^ 

OCT 18 1915 



TO 

^. (Binntl 3teftertl)on 

"in grateful remembrance 

of their youth 

and their already old 

affection" 



Co 

nj 

Li 
-a 



CONTENTS 
I 

PAGE 

Edinburgh 3 

II 
The Rest of Scotland 25 

III 
England 47 

IV 
France 75 

V 
The Rest of Europe 103 

VI 

The United States 127 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Edinburgh Castle — From the Grassmarket Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

Edinburgh^ — ^The Stevenson Home at 17 Heriot 

Row 4 

The Manse at Colinton ........ 10 

Alnwick, on the Great North Road .... 16 

The Burford Bridge Tavern — Dorking r , . 26 

Trafalgar Square— London 32 

"Skerryvore" — Bournemouth 38 

Mentone, from the Jetty 42 

Avignon — Cathedral and Palace of the Popes . 48 

Paris — ^The Luxembourg Gardens 54 

The Heart of the Latin Quarter — Across the 

Place de Rennes from La venue's .... 60 

MoRET — ^The Town Gate 66 

Montigny-Sur-Loing 70 

MONTIGNY-SUR-LOING 76 

The Bridge at Grez — Moonlight 82 

Antwerp^ — ^The Start of the Inland Voyage . . 88 

iz 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

On the Oise Below La Fere 94 

Saint Jacques — Compiegne 98 

A Road in the Cevennes 104 

Along the Water Front — Marseilles . . . . 110 

Hotel des Iles D'Or^ — Hyeres 116 

The Brenner Pass 122 

The Castle of Torita— Guadarrama Plateau . 128 

On the Maas at Rotterdam ....... 134 

Present Appearance of No. 10 West Street, New 

York, as Seen from the Hudson River. . . 140 



Chapter One 
EDINBURGH 



ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

CHAPTER ONE 
EDINBURGH 



Pilgrimages to the homes and haunts of famous authors 
are in many cases merely sentimental journeys. There is a 
type of writer whose works are utterly uninfluenced by the 
places where they were conceived and written. Of this 
type, Edgar Allan Poe may be cited as an extreme example. 
There is no passage in any of his masterpieces to remind us 
that he was born in Boston, lived in Richmond, Philadelphia, 
and New York, and died in Baltimore. Sentimental tourists 
may visit his cottage in Fordham or lay flowers on his grave; 
but in neither of these places will they find the slightest clue 
to the appreciation of his genius. 

The number of American visitors to Stratford-on-Avon is 
at present computed to be more than twenty-five thousand 
a year; but these pilgrims are no nearer to Shakespeare in 
his birthplace than they were in New York or New Haven, in 
Kankakee or Kokomo. There is no mention in the works of 
Shakespeare of the house in Henley Street, nor of Ann Hath- 
away's cottage at Shottery, nor of the Grammar School, nor 
of the lovely little church beside the Avon which became the 



4 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

ultimate repository of his bones. His plays, indeed, give evi- 
dence of an early and abiding love of rural Warwickshire, 
and this trait might be substantiated by an aimless stroll 
across country in any chance direction; but such a stroll is 
seldom undertaken by the sentimental tourists, who seem to 
imagine that As You Like It was derived from recollections 
of the house in Henley Street. 

Such instances as this might almost lead us to decide that 
literary pilgrimages are merely sentimental, and have no 
value for the student or the critic — were it not for the exist- 
ence of another type of writer, whose slightest work takes 
colour from the features of his immediate environment. 
The student of literature can gain nothing from a visit to 
the birthplace of Robert Southey in Bristol; but he can gain 
a great deal from a visit to the primitive cottage where Rob- 
ert Burns was born. This latter visit is informing, and is not 
merely sentimental; for the very place is eloquent in expla- 
nation of the poet's qualities. The genius of some writers is 
rooted in the soil; and, properly to understand the blossom and 
the fruit, we must explore the ground where it was planted. 

Of this type an extreme example is Robert Louis Steven- 
son. Both by temperament and by the circumstances of his 
life, he was a wanderer; and wanderers rarely take root in 
the soil that they so lightly traverse; but nearly every place 
that Stevenson visited for more than a fortnight made a 
keen impression on his mind and exerted an abiding and 
recurrent influence upon his work. After Stevenson had 
lived in any place, he made it live in literature; after he had 
enjoyed himself in any place, he made that place a focus of 
enjoyment for future generations. 




EDINBURGH — THE STEVENSON HOME AT 17 HERIOT ROW 



"Many of those visual impressions of a city 
that recur continually in his wTitings are records 
of what he saw in very early years when he 
looked forth, day and night, from the windows 
of this house." — Page 12. 



EDINBURGH 5 

For this reason, a pilgrimage to the homes and haunts of 
Robert Louis Stevenson is something more than a merely 
sentimental journey. Such a pilgrimage affords the student 
or the critic innumerable clues toward a proper understand- 
ing of the man and a judicious estimation of his w rk. 
Stevenson, with his quick eye for localities, his keen enjoy- 
ment and his vivid recollection of them, may be said to have 
absorbed into himself the many places where he pitched his 
tent, until he was lured forth finally to the ultimate islands 
of the far Pacific; and a visit to the most important of these 
places will lead us to a nearer intimacy with the man and a 
better-founded understanding of his writings. 

II 

Stevenson is one of the most personal of writers. It is 
not merely in those essays wherein he deals directly with his 
memories of people and of places that he is autobiographic; 
he is scarcely less so in those other essays wherein the sub- 
ject is ostensibly external to himself. To cite a single in- 
stance — he evolves his most engaging theory of narrative, 
not from a comparative study of great novels and romances, 
but from a personal recollection of the absurd and cryptic 
sport of lantern-bearing with which he had lighted a summer 
season of his boyhood in North Berwick. He is one of the 
very few authentic poets whose verses are exclusively occa- 
sional; for, except the inconsiderable ballads, practically all 
his poems commemorate occurrences in his own career. 
The technical method of his narrative is, indeed, rigidly ob- 
jective; but the mood is insinuatingly subjective none the 
less; and Treasure Island tells us nearly as much about the 



6 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

author's boyhood as any of his essays. Other novelists had 
studied pirates, but Stevenson had been one; and, instead of 
reteUing "all the old romance exactly in the ancient way," 
he instilled into it the tang of recollection. 

It has frequently been said that Stevenson is an egoist; and 
the appellative is true or not, according to the tone of voice 
in which it is delivered. If the word be understood clear- 
mindedly, in its philosophical significance, it precisely defines 
the process of his mind. The essence of Stevenson's egoism 
is not difficult to discern. In his mental attitude toward his 
own life, he departed in two important ways from the habit 
of the average man: for, first of all, he enjoyed his life, and, 
second, he remembered it. The faculty of self -remembrance 
is rare; and Stevenson was stating a significant truth when 
he wrote to Mr. Henry James, ''I am one of the few people 
in the world who do not forget their own lives"; but the 
faculty of self -enjoyment is even rarer. Most people think 
that they enjoy themselves, whereas all that they really 
enjoy is the pleasant things that happen to them; but in one 
of his most recently published letters (written at the age of 
twenty-three) Stevenson speaks, with the authority of one 
who knows, of "that belle humeur and spirit of adventure that 
makes a pleasure out of what is unpleasant." 

Stevenson, despite a widespread popular impression to 
the contrary, was not, by temperament, a happy man. 
Three years before his death he wrote to Sir Sidney Colvin, 
"I was only happy once; that was at Hyeres." His most 
characteristic mood was a commingling of gaiety and melan- 
choly; and the happiness which is trumpeted in his essays is 
a matter not of temperament but of philosophical conviction. 



1 



EDINBURGH 7 

But he was, by temperament, unfalteringly self-enjoying. 
He enjoyed not only his pleasures, but his diflSculties also, 
and welcomed with undissuaded interest whatever experi- 
ence swam into his ken. A self -en joying nature such as this 
takes possession of its own experience with a completeness 
that is without precedent in the habit of the average man. 
For this reason, Stevenson's life, in a quite unusual sense, 
belongs to him. No incident, in all his drift of years, was 
wasted. Nothing that happened to him seemed trivial; and 
this is the basis of his literary power to make ordinary, 
common things shine forth with a glory that seems strange 
and new. 

Furthermore, Stevenson never lost the tang and glow of 
any particular experience, because of his peculiar genius for 
recollecting his own thoughts and recalling his own emotions. 
Most of us, as we advance through life, burn the bridges be- 
hind us; but he kept his backward communications forever 
free and open. In the preface to Memories and Portraits, 
he speaks of his own young face as a face of the dead; but, 
in truth, it was never so for him. He could always scramble 
down the ladder of his ages and reenjoy a past experience 
without any disenchanting intrusion of his later and maturer 
consciousness. 

A man with this extraordinary gift of seK-enjoyment ren- 
dered permanent by self -remembrance [for there, in a phrase, 
is the essence of Stevenson's egoism] scarcely needs, if the 
drift of his experience be full and varied, to look outside the 
circle of himself to gather knowledge of the world. He will 
study human nature by watching himself, rather than by 
watching other people. '*If I were that sort of person, in 



8 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

that sort of situation, how should I feel and act?" — that is 
Stevenson's criterion of truth in fiction. And his evidence 
of truth in his expository essays seems to be, "This I have 
felt, and now remember: therefore it is life" — a syllogism 
which reminds us of Descartes. To sum up in a single sen- 
tence, Stevenson derives his sense of life in general by in- 
ference from his own sensations of living in particular. 

Since Stevenson's art is prevailingly memorial, we must, in 
order to appreciate it fully, trace it back to its origin in his 
personal experience. If we are properly to appraise the 
work, we cannot know too much about the man. With 
most artists, a distinction may be drawn between their inner 
and their outer lives, and the real experience they conquer 
while following the path of gold is very different from that 
actual experience which drifts to them daily in the world of 
men; but with Stevenson the two lives — the outer and the 
inner, the actual and the real — are fused by his memorial 
imagination into one. This is undeniably the reason why 
his actual life seems to answer so exactly to his character, 
and appears — as he himself would probably have put it — as 
fitting and as true as a romance. His own career is, indeed, 
the most stirring and significant narrative that he has left 
behind him; and, in a very real sense, he is himself his great- 
est character. 

The procedure of Stevenson's thought was rarely intellec- 
tual. He derived his conclusions from emotions; and these 
emotions were induced from the memory of past sensations. 
The initial basis of his equipment was, therefore, his appara- 
tus for sensation; and this apparatus was extraordinarily 
keen. He had quick eyes, quick ears, and was habituated to 



EDINBURGH 9 

respond with energy to every stimulation from without. 
Thus, places which might have excited no reaction from a 
less sensitive observer produced upon his mind an indelible 
impression — an impression which, sublimated by the artis- 
try of memory, he would later put to service in his literary 
work. To appreciate his work completely, it is therefore 
necessary to investigate the various localities which contrib- 
uted successively to that storehouse of sensations from 
which he ultimately abstracted the materials of his finished 
art. For this reason, a pilgrimage on the trail of Stevenson 
must be regarded, not merely as a sentimental journey, but 
also as an adventure in literary criticism. 

Ill 

It has often been said that every child should choose his 
parents wisely; and it might also be averred that every child 
should choose a proper birthplace. This, at least, was done 
by Robert Louis Stevenson. The "gray metropolis of the 
winds," which is lauded in so many of his letters and cele- 
brated in so many of his essays, seems, even to most aliens, 
the supremely fascinating city of the modern world. No 
other capital in Europe can rival its threefold combination 
of beauty of natural locality, impressiveness of monumental 
grandeur, and richness of romantic atmosphere. It is for- 
tunate indeed for literature that a writer whose entire work 
was doomed to bear the impress of whatever sensations he 
might receive from his environment in childhood should 
have been born and reared in "the quaint gray-castled city 
where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and 
the salt showers fly and beat." 



10 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

Wherever Stevenson wandered in later life, that "gusty, 
rainy, smoky, grim old city" kept for itself "the first place 
in the very bottom of his soul." It was half the world away, 
and after he was forty, that he wrote this beautiful paean of 
reminiscence, which has been quoted in the Life by Mr. 
Graham Balfour: "I was born within the bounds of an 
earthly city, illustrious for her beauty, her tragic and pic- 
turesque associations, and for the credit of some of her brave 
sons. Writing as I do in a strange quarter of the world and 
a late day of my age, I can still behold the profile of her 
towers and chimneys, and the long trail of her smoke against 
the sunset; I can still hear those strains of martial music 
that she goes to bed with, ending each day, like an act of 
an opera, to the notes of bugles; still recall, with a grateful 
effort of memory, any one of a thousand beautiful and spe- 
cious circumstances that pleased me, and that must have 
pleased any one, in my half-remembered past. It is the 
beautiful that I thus actively recall: the august airs of the 
castle on its rock, nocturnal passages of lights and trees, the 
sudden song of the blackbird in a suburban lane, rosy and 
dusky winter sunsets, the uninhabited splendours of the early 
dawn, the building up of the city on a misty day, house 
abavej house, spire above spire, until it was received into a 
sky of softly glowing clouds, and seemed to pass on and up- 
ward, by fresh grades and rises, city beyond city, a new 
Jerusalem, bodily scaling heaven." 

The best of all guidebooks to this city of enchantment is 
Stevenson's own Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh^ wherein its 
manifold aspects are charmingly described and many anec- 
dotes of its romantic past are chronicled. This book was 




THE MANSE AT COLINTON 



"The Manse is a sturdy and rectilinear edifice 
— a building, so to speak, with no nonsense about 
it. It is constructed staunchly of gray stone." 
—Page 30. 



EDINBURGH 11 

written when Stevenson was twenty-seven years of age. It 
was begun in Paris and finished in Le Monastier; and this 
fact calls attention to a significant method of the writer's 
mind. Throughout his lifelong wanderings, Stevenson 
rarely or never attempted to describe a place so long as he 
was in it. For his selection of descriptive details he relied 
always on the subconscious artistry of memory. He 
trusted his own mind to forget the non-essential; and he 
seized upon whatever he remembered as, by that token, the 
most essential features of a scene — ^the features, therefore, 
that cried out to be selected as the focal points of the picture 
to be suggested to the mind's eye of his readers. 

But, oddly enough, Stevenson's little book on Edinburgh 
is less autobiographic than the majority of his other essays. 
He makes no mention, in this work, of those particular lo- 
calities in which the intimate passages of his own life had 
been enshrined. The Stevensonian who visits Edinburgh 
will, therefore, feel the need of some additional notes to guide 
him to the homes and special haunts of the keenest lover of 
Auld Reekie since that *'king of the romantics" who, in his 
own day, was wont to call it "miiie own romantic town." 

IV 

It was at No. 8 Howard Place, in Edinburgh, that Robert 
Louis Stevenson was born, on November 13th, 1850. This is 
a sturdy little stone house of two stories, one of a row ex- 
actly similar to it, situated immediately to the north of the 
Water of Leith, in an outlying and scarcely fashionable 
quarter of the New Town. This house, however, can have 
made no impression on his mind; for in January, 1853, his 



n ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

parents moved diagonally across the street to a somewhat 
larger house at No. 1 Inverleith Terrace. Here they lived 
till Stevenson was nearly seven; and it was here that he be- 
gan to be cognizant of the external world. In his essay en- 
titled Rosa Quo Locorum, he tells us how his imagination 
localized the twenty-third psalm in certain places immedi- 
ately adjacent to this second residence. 

In May, 1857, the family moved to No. 17 Heriot Row; 
and it was in this house, which remained their home till the 
death of Thomas Stevenson in 1887, that Louis passed the 
most impressionable period of his childhood. In no passage 
of his work does he formally describe the residence in Heriot 
Row; but many of those visual impressions of a city that 
recur continually in his writings are records of what he saw 
in very early years when he looked forth, day and night, 
from the windows of this house. Heriot Row is half a mile 
southward^ — or toward the centre of the city — ^from the 
Water of Leith, and occupies much higher ground than How- 
ard Place. It is situated in the very heart of the New Town, 
in an urbane and stately neighbourhood. The northerly, or 
rear, windows of the houses of Heriot Row open on a decliv- 
ity of hill and overlook innumerable roofs and chimney-pots 
that fall away to the Firth of Forth and lead the eye, on 
clear days, to the habitable hills of Fife upon the farther side. 
The front, or southerly, windows look across ''the dark belt 
of the Queen Street gardens" to the higher houses upon 
Queen Street. Directly in front of No. 17 there stands 
a lamp-post — because of which [so deep at first, and in 
the end so wide, may be the influence of a single concrete 
object] little children in far-divided lands now sing the 



EDINBURGH 13 

magic line, *'For we are very lucky, with a lamp before 
the door." 

At No. 52 Queen Street, diagonally across the gardens 
from Heriot Row, was the residence of Sir James Young 
Simpson, Bart., who discovered the use of chloroform as an 
anaesthetic, and to whom a statue has been erected in the 
Princes Street Gardens. This house was a haunt of Steven- 
son's in his teens and twenties, for the children of the great 
physician were among his most intimate friends. Sir Walter 
Simpson was the "Cigarette" of the Inland Voyage, and was 
also Stevenson's host on a yachting cruise in August, 1874, 
from which he learned (according to his own account) the 
few details of seamanship which were necessary for the 
handling of the Hispaniola in Treasure Island, Sir Walter's 
surviving sister. Miss Eve Blantyre Simpson, has published 
three books about R. L. S. which afford intimate glimpses of 
his personality in his youthful years. 

When the present writer visited No. 17 Heriot Row in 
August, 1910, the house was vacant and for sale; and Mr. 
Francis Watt, in his recent interesting book on R. L, S., 
records that it was still unoccupied when he saw it in the 
autumn of 1912. If Stevenson were as highly considered 
in his native city as he is in the rest of the English-reading 
world, a fund might be raised for taking over the house in 
Heriot Row and establishing it as a permanent museum to 
his memory. 

There is another house in Edinburgh that is of interest to 
travellers on the trail of R. L. S. This is the ancestral resi- 
dence of the Stevenson family, at No. 1 Baxter's Place. This 
roomy and somewhat gloomy edifice was built by Thomas 



14 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

Smith, the stepfather (and also the father-in-law) of Robert 
Stevenson; and was inhabited successively by Robert and 
his sons, of whom the youngest, Thomas Stevenson, was 
the father of R. L. S. It is situated at the outset of Leith 
Walk, in a quarter that has latterly degenerated to a district 
of petty commerce; and the dignity of the old house has 
been diminished by a row of single-storied shops that have 
been packed in front of it. Stevenson described this house, 
in some detail, in a fragment of family history written in 
Samoa; but he had never actually lived there, since his 
grandfather Robert had died four months before R. L. S. was 
born. 

A transition of only a few hundred yards will carry the 
traveller across Leith Walk to the corner of Antigua Street, 
where stands to this day the stationer's shop that is cele- 
brated in A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured, The 
shop is still "dark and smells of Bibles"; but, alas! there is 
no longer a toy-theatre in the window that juts out into 
Leith Walk — ^for Skelt's Juvenile Drama, ''after having 
changed its name to Park's, to Webb's, to Redington's, and 
last of all to Pollock's, has now become, for the most part, a 
memory." 

Leith Walk, which is described in this essay as ''the wide 
thoroughfare that joins the city of my childhood with the 
sea," was often traversed by Louis in his boyhood, when, as 
he says, "upon any Saturday, we made a party to behold the 
ships." It is not surprising, therefore, that he should have 
allowed his hero, David Balfour, to follow this route to the 
suburb of Pilrig, where he interviewed, in a house that is still 
extant, the actual James Balfour of Pilrig, sometime Pro- 



EDINBURGH 15 

fessor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh University, who 
was Stevenson's great-great-grandfather on his mother's 

side. 

V 

Because of his precarious health in childhood, Stevenson's 
schooling was exceedingly irregular. From 1858 to 1861 
he attended, in the intervals of illness, a school kept by a Mr. 
Henderson in India Street. This street runs northward out 
of Heriot Row, one block to the west of the Stevenson home. 
From 1864 to 1867 he was an irregular attendant at Mr. 
Thomson's school in Frederick Street; and to reach this 
school he had merely to step across the gardens from his 
house. Frederick Street leads southward from Heriot Row 
to the centre of the modern city in Princes Street, three 
blocks away. 

But the only one of Stevenson's schools which really re- 
pays the attention of the visitor to his native city is the Ed- 
inburgh Academy, which he attended for a year and a half, 
beginning in the autumn of 1861. This famous institution 
is located on low ground near the Water of Leith, a few 
blocks southwest of Stevenson's birthplace. Not far 
from this locality was formerly situated the village of Sil- 
vermills, which is mentioned so frequently in Kidnapped and 
David Balfour, The Academy building is a somewhat dingy 
imitation of a Greek temple, set in a gravel yard made rau- 
cous by the cries of many boys. 

To reach the Academy from Heriot Row, Louis was ac- 
customed to run downhill by way of Howe Street, passing 
the rather formal and forbidding edifice of St. Stephen's 
Church, where his father — an officer of the congregation — 



16 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

was a regular attendant. A continuous line of iron railings 
separates the sidewalks of Howe Street from the areas of the 
houses; and it is easy for the pilgrim to picture little Louis 
rattling on these railings with his "clackan" — a wooden 
club with which the Edinburgh schoolboy was wont to make 
morning hideous on his way to school. This noisy exercise 
was subsequently assigned by Stevenson to the hero of The 
Misadventures of John Nicholson. 

From the Academy, it is necessary to traverse nearly 
the entire city, and to climb over a high hill and two suc- 
cessive valleys, in order to reach Edinburgh University, in 
South Bridge Street, where, from 1867 to 1875, Stevenson 
idled through the training for his two false starts in life^ — 
first as an engineer, and subsequently as a lawyer. Of the 
impressive quadrangle of the University there is a suggestive 
description in a letter written by Louis, some years later, to 
Sir Sidney Colvin. This quadrangle has not changed its 
aspect since the student days of R. L. S., except that the 
massive cupola over the entry was not erected till a later 
date. 

The Stevensonian who visits Edinburgh University will 
be most interested in the rooms of the Speculative Society, 
which still answer exactly to the description that was given 
of them in the essay on A College Magazine — "a hall, Tur- 
key-carpeted, hung with pictures, looking, when lighted up 
at night with fire and candle, like some goodly dining-room; 
a passage-like library, walled with books in their wire cages, 
and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints 
of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of 
a former secretary." These details remain unaltered; but 







ALNWICK, ON THE GREAT NORTH ROAD 



"Stevenson's mind was particularly capti- 
vated by the legendary pageant of the Great 
North Road, over which the tide of travel had 
swept, for many centuries, northward to his 
native Edinburgh. In ISS^ he began a novel 
which was called The Great North Road. Later 
in life he returned to the haunting prospect of 
this highway and used it as the setting for several 
of the chapters of St. Ives." — Page 55. 



( 



Ij 



EDINBURGH 17 

two others have been added, to remind the visitor more par- 
ticularly of R. L. S. One is a photograph of him, hung prom- 
inently on the wall; and the other is the Union Jack of 
the schooner-yacht Casco — the flag which was draped 
over the body of Tusitala when he lay dead at Vailima 
and the natives watched all night beside his bier. This 
token was presented to the Speculative Society by Ste- 
venson's fellow-member and lifelong friend, Mr. Charles 
Baxter. 

A visit to the Parliament House, where, in the ancient 
hall in which the Parliament of Scotland was formerly 
ctonvened, Stevenson walked in wig and gown with other 
young and briefless advocates during his short career as a 
lawyer in 1875, will lead the traveller to the very Heart of 
Midlothian — the centre of the Old Town of Edinburgh. 
The hall itself is very beautiful, and well repays a visit, with 
its noble oaken rafters, its stained-glass window streamed 
through by the southern sun, and its many busts and por- 
traits of famous advocates. 

It is but a step from the Parliament House to St. Giles's 
Cathedral, where, on a wall adjacent to the southern aisle, 
the visitor will find the beautiful bas-relief of Stevenson 
by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, which has been erected 
in honour of R. L. S. "by readers in all quarters of the 
world." 

From the Cathedral, the High Street ascends directly 
to the summit of the precipitous rock which is crowned by 
Edinburgh Castle. It was here, of course, that St. Ives 
was confined as a prisoner from France; and the reader of 
the novel will probably turn dizzy as he gazes down the 



18 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

precipice where the hero dangled himself to freedom by a 

rope. 

VI 

The lofty Castle offers an uninterrupted prospect of all 
of Edinburgh; and from this point of vantage, with the city 
spread out like a relief -map beneath his feet, the pilgrim 
may pick out many other localities which are particularly 
celebrated in the Picturesque Notes or put to literary uses 
in the essays and the tales of R. L. S. 

Perhaps the most fascinating chapter in Stevenson's little 
book on Edinburgh is that devoted to the Greyfriars church- 
yard; and a reading of this chapter on the ground itself 
affords the student a valuable clue to the author's method 
of selecting descriptive details. It has been already noted 
that he wrote this passage in France, and wrote it from mem- 
ory. The pilgrim need not, therefore, be surprised to notice 
that Stevenson has deleted many of those details which 
bulk most largely on the sight of a person present at Grey- 
friars, and has made much of many details which would ut- 
terly elude the observation of most visitors. 

But an even more enchanting experience awaits the trav- 
eller who will read the essay entitled Old Mortality in the 
very graveyard that is carefully described in the opening 
paragraph. This is the old Calton Hill burial ground, which 
is situated half way up the steep rise at the east end of 
Princes Street. It is still ''looked upon on the one side by 
a prison, on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel"; 
but, alas, the "beautiful housemaid of the hotel," who " once, 
for some days together, dumbly flirted with the author from 
a window and kept his wild heart flying," is no longer to be 



EDINBURGH 19 

noted from the graveyard. Doubtless she, too, has paid her 
toll to Old Mortality; but it is a sorrow to record that "the 
wise Eugenia" does not even appear to have left any suc- 
cessors to continue the tradition of romance. 

In so brief a chapter as the present, it is, unfortunately, 
impossible to guide the traveller to all the haunts of Steven- 
son in Edinburgh; but the places that have already been 
enumerated are those that require the chief attention of the 
student of his life and of his works. To pick out all the lo- 
calities that are mentioned in David Balfour and *S^. Ives and 
Weir of Hermiston, for instance, would require a very minute 
exploration of the Old Town; and the traveller who under- 
takes to read his way through Edinburgh with the Pictur- 
esque Notes will find himself kept pleasantly occupied for 

many days. 

VII 

Until a year or two ago, it was possible for privileged 
visitors to Edinburgh to be taken nearer to the heart of 
R. L. S. than any one can ever reach henceforward by mak- 
ing a pilgrimage upon his trail. The death of Alison Cun- 
ningham in the summer of 1913 severed the last link that 
connected the childhood of Louis Stevenson with the living 
world. There are other people left in Edinburgh who re- 
member him, and some who will tell you tales in disapproval 
of him; but there are none who knew him so well and loved 
him so deeply as Cummy — ^his "second mother," his "first 
wife." 

It was my privilege to pass many hours in her company, 
on several different days in the summer of 1910, three years 
before her death, and to enjoy the eager volubility of her 



20 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

talk as she rambled on in reminiscence of her "Master Lou." 
She was already of a great age, and the beauty of her face 
seemed to have been chiselled in eternal granite. She had 
become almost completely deaf, and her eyesight was fading 
rapidly; but the dimming of these senses seemed only to ac- 
centuate the expressiveness of her voice and of her gestures. 
She had a grand, hymn-singing voice, with a sort of sturdy 
gentleness of intonation. Her hands were the most eloquent 
that I have ever known. She had a way of suddenly seizing 
both your hands in hers; and by that touch she knew you, 
and had no need of hearing or of sight. Louis has sung of 
her "most comfortable hand " ; and there is no other adjective 
so fitting to describe a feeling that afforded you a sense of 
strong shelter and insuperable peace. There were times, 
too, when Cummy would grasp you by both shoulders and 
draw you eagerly to her bosom; and it was as if you were 
being taken to the heart of all of womankind. 

Despite her disabilities of sight and hearing, she went 
forth every day for a brisk walk with her favourite dog; and 
there was an ardour in her talk which held aloof the touch of 
time. She could seldom answer a precise question; she had 
become, indeed, incapable of conversation; but her talk was 
a tireless soliloquy, lacking in coherence to be sure, but 
always eloquent and often illuminative. She would ramble 
on through many moods; and now a mist would hover in 
her eyes at the touch of some tender recollection, and again 
her rich voice would break out into peals of laughter at the 
impetus of that rollicking mood which would surge up very 
often from the years that were. 

There were many treasures in the little room in which she 



EDINBURGH 21 

lived — a photograph of Mrs. Thomas Stevenson taken at an 
early age, and showing her very lovely in the quaint dress of 
the middle of the nineteenth century, a painting by Bob 
Stevenson which Cummy didn't really like but which she 
valued as the work of an adopted nephew, several pictures 
and other mementoes of Louis himself, and a charming pho- 
tograph, of which she was especially proud, which showed 
the young and beautiful Duchess of Sutherland standing 
gracefully beside a chair which had been set for Cummy in 
the gardens of Swanston Cottage. "I told Her Grace that 
I should stand," said Cummy, '* being only an ordinary 
woman; but Her Ladyship would have me seated in the 
chair — and there we are, with a Duchess standing in the 
presence of old me!" 

Of the many anecdotes that Cummy told me, there is one 
that seems especially worth recording, since it has not yet 
made its way into any of the books on R. L. S. When little 
Louis was about five years old, he did something naughty, 
and Cummy stood him up in a corner and told him he would 
have to stay there for ten minutes. Then she left the room. 
At the end of the allotted period, she returned and said, 
" Time's up. Master Lou : you may come out now." But the 
little boy stood motionless in his penitential corner. "That's 
enough; time's up," repeated Cummy. And then the child 
mystically raised his hand, and, with a strange light in his 
eyes, "Hush . . . "he said, "I'm telling myself a 
story. . . ." 

She would tell you proudly that Louis, in his childhood, 
was a very religious boy. "He got that from me, you 
know," she added, with a friendly little nudge. But she 



22 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

would tell you even more fondly of the times when he would 
wheedle a shilling out of his father and lead Cummy forth 
upon an expedition to squander this new fortune broadcast 
through the world. 

Well, Cummy is gone now; and the literary pilgrim can no 
longer jangle the bell of the echoing house in which she lived 
and climb up to the little room which her noble, human 
presence made so great. Edinburgh, that inexhaustible city 
of romance, remains to be explored by future Stevenson- 
ians; but those of us who remember Cummy must ever be 
haunted, on returning to Auld Reekie in either fact or fancy, 
by the recollection of an empty chair. 



I 



Chapter Two 
THE REST OF SCOTLAND 



I 



f 



CHAPTER TWO 
THE REST OF SCOTLAND 



Edinburgh is not only the most nobly seated of all European 
capitals; it is also the most charmingly surrounded. All 
guidebooks are agreed that, though the city itself may be 
seen in a couple of days, it is necessary to devote at least a 
week to the environs. If you climb to Edinburgh Castle, 
high perched upon its precipice of rock, and look afar in all 
directions, you will understand the reason why. On every 
side except the east, where the sea melts into a mystery of 
gray, the sky is hedged with hills — ^familiar, habitable hills 
that beckon you to wander; and as you gaze upon them you 
recall that sentence of De Quincey's — the same De Quincey 
who is buried in St. Cuthbert's churchyard, deep below the 
bastions of the Castle where you stand- — "Oh, that I had the 
wings of a dove!" . . . There is an impulse that calls 
you to go winging over the hills and far away; but not so 
very far, neither — for you would wish to fly home at evening 
to the lofty Castle, and watch the lights come out along the 
stately line of Princes Street, and a myriad other city lamps 
become illumined like a galaxy of stars beneath your feet, 
pricking out a map of Edinburgh through the dark. 

Those who love Edinburgh love to roam among those hills 
and to return to Auld Reekie in the evening. Here is a 

25 



26 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

city whose suburbs are not suburbs, but points of view from 
which you may look back upon the crown of Scotland. Hill 
after hill you wander over, only to look back — still loyal to 
that queenliest of cities while you visit the little towns-in- 
waiting that attend her. 

Southwest from Edinburgh Castle, that line of hills which 
rises only three or four miles away, and curves so comfort- 
ably into a distance beyond the utmost verge of sight, is the 
Pentlands; and this very name reminds us that we are visit- 
ing Robert Louis Stevenson at home. His first printed work 
was "a page of history" on the subject of The Pentland Ris- 
ing, which was written when he was barely sixteen years of 
age, and was issued as a little pamphlet in grass-green wrap- 
pers by Andrew Elliott, of Edinburgh. The bookshop of 
Andrew Elliott is still doing business under the old name at 
the same address. No. 17 Princes Street; but no copies of 
The Pentland Rising can now be purchased there. Nearly 
all of the original edition was bought up by Stevenson's 
father; and the pamphlet, thus withdrawn summarily from 
circulation, has become one of the rarest items in the libraries 
of Stevenson collectors. 

In the Pentland Hills are situated two of the best-beloved 
homes of R. L. S. ; and, since he always worked from recol- 
lection, it is not surprising that he set SL Ives and Weir of 
Hermiston in this locality, and that he celebrated in his es- 
says and his poems those particular places in the Pentlands 
which had registered the deepest impressions on his mind. 
In a single day, if the traveller be sturdy on his legs, he may 
trace the trail of Stevenson through the Pentland country; 
and the quickest way to launch hiniself upon this literary 




THE BURFORD BRIDGE T A VERN — D ORKING 



" Of one actual English tavern our author ap- 
pears to have been particularly fond:— the inn 
at Burford Bridge, 'with its arbours and green 
garden and silent, eddying river.' 
Louis lived twice at this haunted and historic 
tavern— in April, 1878, and again in April, 1882." 
— Page 56. 



THE REST OF SCOTLAND 27 

pilgrimage is to take a train from the Caledonian Station to 
the little town of Colinton, which is only four miles away. 

II 

Colinton is a modern-looking suburb, and most of it has 
lately been built up with those new-fangled villas which 
Louis cursed so heartily in his Picturesque Notes on Edin- 
burgh; but one of these villas is now the residence of Mrs. 
George W. Balfour, the widow of "that wise youth, my 
uncle," and this very courteous lady will direct you to the 
Manse. 

The main highway of Colinton overhangs a wooded dell, 
at the bottom of which the Water of Leith ambles from mill 
to mill in a series of diminutive cascades. From this high- 
way you climb down to Colinton Church, which is perched 
midway of the declivity and is surrounded by a sloping 
graveyard. The church, which was built as late as 1771, 
is inconspicuous; and nobody would ever pause to look at it, 
were it not for the fact that its apparently unimportant pul- 
pit was occupied from 1823 to 1860 by the Reverend Lewis 
Balfour, that maternal grandfather of R. L. S. who "moved 
in his blood, and whispered words to him, and sat efficient 
in the very knot and centre of his being." 

The slanting graveyard is restrained by a stone wall from 
launching its gathered dead like an avalanche upon the level 
little plot below, where Colinton Manse, surrounded by its 
garden, is embraced within a wide curve of the stream. If 
you dangle your feet over this retaining wall, you can survey 
the entire garden, while you re-read the opening pages of the 
essay on The Manse, in which this garden is described. A 



28 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

comparison of the actual scene with Stevenson's description 
of it affords us an important clue to the process of his art. 
He has selected very few details; but these few are precisely 
those which produce the most vivid impression on the imme- 
diate observer and which are destined to be retained subse- 
quently in the memory. The great yew tree still makes "a 
pleasing horror of shade"; and the eye, after wandering else- 
where in the garden, insists upon returning to that pleasing 
horror again and yet again. 

I was lolling on that wall, where " after nightfall * spunkies' 
might be seen to dance, at least by children," when a gar- 
dener busy among the "flower-plots lying warm in sun- 
shine" invited me to leap down into the garden. All at once, 
as I alighted in that sacred precinct, a throng of little lisping 
poems sang, remembered, in my ears; for here was indeed 
that Child's Garden, of which a lyric memory has been 
wafted, with our English language, over all the rolling ron- 
dure of the world, so that now "the children sing in far 
Japan" such originally local lines as these: 

Here is the mill with the humming of thunder. 
Here is the weir with the wonder of foam, 

Here is the sluice with the race running under — 
Marvellous places, though handy to home! 

It has already been stated in these pages that Stevenson's 
habit was never to describe a place except in recollection. 
Nearly all the pieces that make up the Child's Garden of 
Verses were written at Hyeres, in the south of France, or at 
Bournemouth, in the south of England; but many of them 
are localized in the actual garden of the Manse at Colinton, 



THE REST OF SCOTLAND 29 

which he remembered through a mist of over twenty years. 
The water that "made music in his memory" was "that 
dirty Water of Leith" whose sand still "slopes into brown 
obscurity with a glint of gold." 

To appreciate the Child's Garden as a work of art, we must 
remember that the poems which Louis fluted on his "penny 
whistle" were not so much written /or children as written 
in recollection of his own experience of childhood. He did 
not ask himself what children would like; he merely remem- 
bered what he himself had liked when he had been a child. 
His rhymes, as he stated in the Envoy to two of the cousins 
who had played with him at Colinton, were veritably 
"rhymes of old delight"; and this point will be impressed 
most vividly upon the traveller who, in the garden of the 
Manse, may identify the very trees and bushes that are com- 
memorated in many of these poems. 

The present incumbent of Colinton Manse was away 
upon a holiday when I dropped unceremoniously into the 
precinct of that "well-beloved house"; and the gardener, 
upon his own initiative, guided me through the empty 
rooms. The "many Indian pictures" and other "wonders 
of the East" which had made the Manse alluringly out- 
landish in the days of Dr. Balfour had been, of course, 
denuded from the walls; but it was still possible to imagine 
one's way backward to the early years of R. L. S. in the sim- 
ple little chamber on the second story that used to be his 
bedroom. Through the open window one could hear the 
little river rushing to the weir; and the wooded cliff of the 
sky-assailing hill across the stream still seemed a proper hid- 
ing-place for pirates. 



i 



30 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

Externally, the Manse is a sturdy and rectilinear edifice 
— a building, so to speak, with no nonsense about it. It is 
constructed staunchly of gray stone. It does not look so 
large as it seemed to Louis "by the standard of his childish 
stature"; but it does present the aspect of a "roomy house." 
It has not been altered in the last half century, except that 
what was formerly a side door has now become the main 
entrance; and the Manse and the surrounding garden — not 
to mention the very friendly gardener — ^make the visitor 
so much at home that he is loath to leave that charmed lo- 
cality, even to stretch his legs over a brief reach of Pentland 
country to the still more charmed locality of Swanston. 

Ill 

The pastoral hamlet of Swanston sleeps but little more 
than two miles southeast from Colinton; and, if you are 
really a lover of the best of all celebrants of Walking Tours, 
you will make this way afoot. The road leads past the 
Hunter's Tryst, in a little fold or wrinkle at the foot of the 
Pentland Hills. 

It was in 1867, when R. L. S. was seventeen, that the 
Stevensons first rented Swanston Cottage; and, thereafter, 
it remained for many years their country residence. No 
other home, not even the house in Heriot Row, produced 
such deep impressions on the memory of one who was to 
wander over more than half the habitable globe. It is a 
far cry from Swanston Cottage to Vailima; but when, in the 
all-too-early sundown of his years, Stevenson dictated St, I 

Ives to Mrs. Strong, his heart returned with a pang of recol- 
lection to this little house among his "hills of home," and 



THE REST OF SCOTLAND 31 

he chose it as the scene of two of the most moving passages 
in the story. 

Chapter VII of St, Ives is entitled *'Swanston Cottage." 
It is to this hidden haven that the hero makes his way after 
his escape from Edinburgh Castle. Later, in Chapter 
XXVI, which is entitled ''The Cottage at Night," the gar- 
den of this old home of Stevenson's is made the setting of one 
of the few successful love-scenes in his fiction. The descrip- 
tion of the cottage, written at Vailima a dozen years since he 
had seen it last, is surprisingly exact. "The cottage was a 
little quaint place of many rough-cast gables and gray roofs. 
It had something the air of a rambling infinitesimal cathe- 
dral, the body of it rising in the midst two stories high, with 
a steep-pitched roof, and sending out upon all hands 
(as it were chapter-houses, chapels, and transepts) one- 
storied and dwarfish projections. . . . The place 
seemed hidden away, being not only concealed in the 
trees of the garden, but, on the side on which I approached 
it, buried as high as the eaves by the rising of the 
ground." 

This description, from the seventh chapter of St, IveSy 
still serves the traveller to-day. Swanston Cottage is at 
first somewhat difficult for the foot-farer to find, because it 
is folded so aloofly in a little lap of the hills. As Louis 
wrote, in his descriptive poem entitled Ille Terrarum: 

Atween the muckle Pentland's knees. 
Secure ye sit. 

Stevenson's little-read poems in Scots are among the most 
intimately personal of all his writings; and it is a significant 



32 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

fact that, in more than one of these poems, he has celebrated 
the locahty of Swanston. 

Swanston Cottage is now the summer residence of Lord 
Guthrie, who is one of the most eminent jurists in Scotland. 
Forty years ago, he was a fellow-student of Stevenson's in 
the law classes at Edinburgh University, and a fellow- 
member of the Speculative Society. His love of R. L. S. 
is now a living virtue, and not merely a shadowy recollection 
from the years that were. 

A legend on the gate to the grounds of Swanston Cottage 
warns unauthorized intruders that the place is private prop- 
erty; but an accredited student of Stevenson has only to 
send in his card in order to enjoy the generous hospitality of 
Lord Guthrie. He will be permitted to wander all about 
the lovely little garden, and to re-read at his leisure that 
youthful essay on An Old Scotch Gardener which recalls to 
life the sturdy Robert Young who used to tend " the garden 
in the lap of the hill, with its rocks overgrown with clematis, 
its shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of champaign 
that one saw from the northwest corner." The poems, also, 
in praise of that locality seem to read more sweetly there; 
and the visitor may still discern the initials "R. L. S." cut 
proudly on a tree trunk, with the accompanying insignia 
of the rising sun. 

The interior of Swanston Cottage is no less fascinating 
to the traveller on the trail of Stevenson. The little room 
on the second story, which projects with a bow-window 
toward the garden, was formerly the den of R. L. S. ; and 
this room has been set apart by Lord Guthrie as a perma- 
nent memorial to his famous friend. Upon the walls are 



:. 



?*r:«:*^;«^j*J.'it>^?>k' 



:jvj^vv^i^Se^v_ :^:-/i:-fr^ 



•;« i^'.-fengwj ' 




v,'a^- '<.'&. l^^> ^ 









TRAFALGAR SQ U AR E— LOND ON 



The scene of the murder of IVIr. Malthus. of 
The Suicide Club. "Any tourist ^ill notice that 
the parapet of Trafalgar Square is scarcely high 
enough to insure the instant death of any one who 
might be flung summarily to the flagstones 
below." — Page 61. 



THE REST OF SCOTLAND 33 

hung the originals of all but one of the letters that Steven- 
son wrote in his lifetime to his old nurse, Alison Cunningham; 
and the single missing letter is supplanted by a photograph 
of the original. Lord Guthrie looked after Cummy in her 
declining years; and she was frequently a visitor to the 
sweet, secluded cottage where she had lived so long ago as 
the second mother of the youth who now is noted through 
the world. 

Only a few steps from Swanston Cottage is situated 
Swanston Farmhouse; and around this are clustered a dozen 
thatched-roofed, whitewashed little cottages, where live 
the shepherds of those hills. One of these is pointed out to 
travellers as the former residence of John Todd, whose name 
was made immortal in Stevenson's essay entitled Pastoral, 
It is pleasant to re-read this essay " perched on a hump of the 
declivity not far from Halkerside," and to recall that former 
giant of this slumberous locality whose voice *' shook the 
hills when he was angry" and who was wont to go "winding 
up the brae, keeping his captain's eye upon all sides, and 
breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of bellowing that 
seemed to make the evening bleaker." 

The traveller who wishes to push farther into the Pent- 
lands may identify several other places that are celebrated 
in the works of R. L. S. Glencorse Church, for instance, 
which is the scene of Chapter VI of Weir of Hermiston, is 
only a few miles southeast of Swanston. This church is 
described in some detail in a letter addressed to Mrs. Sit well 
from Swanston Cottage in June, 1875; and it seems also to 
have served as the setting of the poem entitled A Lowden 
Sabbath Morn, From Vailima, while he was composing 



34 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

Weir of Hermiston, Stevenson wrote of it again in a letter 
addressed to the late S. R. Crockett: "Do you know where 
the road crosses the burn under Glencorse Church? Go there 
and say a prayer for me: moriturus salutat. See that it's a 
sunny day; I would like it to be a Sunday, but that's not 
possible in the premises; and stand on the right-hand bank 
just where the road goes down into the water, and shut your 
eyes, and if I don't appear to you! well, it can't be helped, 
and will be extremely funny." 

But the most vivid description of that portion of the 
Pentland Hills which Louis had explored so intimately in 
his rambles with the Swanston shepherd occurs in the fol- 
lowing lines, which were written at Apemama in the South 
Sea Islands, and which prove that, however far he wandered, 
his heart was ever faithful to his "hills of home": 

The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, 
From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir, 
Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again. 
Far set in fields and woods, the town I see 
Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke, 
Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort 
Beflagged. About, on seaward-drooping hiUs 
New folds of city glitter. Last, the Forth 
Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles. 
And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns. 

IV 

Another brief excursion from the capital will lead the 
pilgrim to the little town of Queensferry, which is situated 
on the Firth of Forth, about eight miles northwest from 



THE REST OF SCOTLAND 35 

Edinburgh Castle. This trip may most conveniently be 
made in one of those sight-seeing motor-cars that drag be- 
wildered tourists in droves to gape at the great Forth Bridge 
which, as a work of engineermg, is justly celebrated among 
the wonders of the modern world. 

This gigantic bridge now overhangs an ancient, inconspic- 
uous little tavern, which was famed in literary annals many 
years before the railroad was invented. I have watched 
American tourists turn their backs upon this tavern while 
they gazed upward to admire the steel structure overhead; 
and yet, before this bridge had been begun, Louis Stevenson 
had noted, in A Gossip on Romance, that Americans were 
wont to seek the Hawes Inn at Queensferry "for the sake of 
Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of the 
Antiquary.'' 

The Hawes Inn, as he tells us in this essay, made always a 
strong call upon his fancy. "There it stands, apart from the 
town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, 
half marine — in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and 
the guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old gar- 
den with the trees. ... I have lived ... at the 
Hawes ... in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it 
seemed, of some adventure that should justify the place; but 
though the feeling had me to bed at night and called me again 
at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, 
nothing befell me . . . worth remark. The man or 
the hour had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat 
shall put off from the Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear 
cargo. . . ." 

This passage was originally written in 1882. When the 



36 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

essay was reprinted five years later, in Memories and Por- 
traits, the author added this interesting note: "Since the 
above was written I have tried to launch the boat with my 
own hands in Kidnapped,'' The Hawes Inn still answers, in 
every detail, to the description that has just been quoted; 
and the traveller of to-day will find it very easy to reenact, 
in his imagination, the scenes of Kidnapped that are set 
there. 

It is from this tavern that David Balfour sets forth in the 
brig Covenant at the outset of the story; and it is to this 
tavern that he returns at the end of his long and perilous 
wanderings through the heather. The town of Queensferry 
straggles westward from the Hawes Inn, along a single street 
that follows the curving of the firth. It is a quaint little 
ancient-looking place, utterly gray in colour and rather 
melancholy in its somnolence; and the visitor will note the 
aptness of David Balfour's description of it in Chapter 
XXVII of Kidnapped: "I was in the long street of Queens- 
ferry before the sun was up. It was a fairly built burgh, the 
houses of good stone, many slated; the town-hall not so fine, 
I thought, as that of Peebles, nor yet the street so noble; 
but, take it altogether, it put me to shame for my foul 
tatters." 

Four miles eastward from Queensferry, on the Firth of 
Forth, is the quiet town of Cramond, which is thus described 
in Chapter XXX of St. Ives: "A little hamlet on a little river, 
embowered in woods, and looking forth over a great flat of 
quicksand to where a little islet stood planted in the sea." 
Here the traveller may visit Cramond Church and Cramond 
Inn, "a hostelry of no very promising appearance" which is 



THE REST OF SCOTLAND 37 

the scene of the convivial adventures that are narrated in the 
chapter to which reference has been made. 



The student of Catriona, or David Balfour as we call it in 
America, will wish to wander eastward from the capital along 
the seashore. His wanderings will lead him past the Gul- 
lane Sands to the jagged promontory where the ruins of 
Tantallon Castle look seaward toward the Bass. The Bass 
Rock, as the reader will remember, is the scene of Black 
Andie's tale of Tod Lapraik, which is told in Chapter XV of 
Catriona, This locality had haunted the imagination of 
Stevenson since his childhood. In his autobiographic essay 
called The Lantern Bearers, he tells us that "the Bass in the 
eye of fancy still flew the colours of King James, and in the 
ear of fancy the arches of Tantallon still rang with horseshoe 
iron and echoed to the commands of Bell-the-Cat." The " cer- 
tain easterly fisher village" that is so eloquently celebrated 
in this famous essay is North Berwick, a little to the west of 
Tantallon. The town is now somewhat overgrown with sea- 
side hotels, which are haunted by ardent practitioners of the 
national game of golf; but the points which are selected for 
description at the outset of The Lantern Bearers may still be 
picked out and identified by the literary pilgrim. 

It was from this particular stretch of seacoast that Ste- 
venson apparently derived those impressions which he has 
recorded with such thrilling vividness in The Pavilion on the 
Links, This novelette, which was written when the author 
was only twenty-nine years old, is seldom spoken of, even 
among people who regard themselves as ardent Steven soni- 



38 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

ans; but I remember now a conversation with Sir Sidney 
Colvin, inhis hospitable study at "the Monument," in which 
this most authoritative critic expressed an admiration of 
this story which struck me at the moment as extreme. I 
had evinced a temporary preference for the essays of R. L. S. 
and had suggested that Pulvis et Umbra was perhaps a 
greater work than any of his narratives. Sir Sidney disagreed 
with this suggestion. It appeared that he had never quite 
approved of that dark Darwinian sermon which I regarded 
as Stevenson's supreme achievement; and, in pleading for 
the preeminence of Stevenson's fiction over his essays, he 
requested me to re-read The Pavilion on the Links, which 
he considered one of the very greatest masterpieces of his 
friend. I state this little point at present without argument, 
because it seems to me exceedingly suggestive. 

VI 

To follow, chapter by chapter, the adventures that are 
chronicled in Kidnapped, the traveller would have to cir- 
cumnavigate the whole of the peninsula of Scotland. It will 
be remembered that the Covenant, with the hero unwillingly 
trepanned on board, sets sail from Queensferry to the north, 
turns westward round the Orkney Islands, and in the perilous 
channel between the mainland and the Hebrides runs down 
an open boat and rescues from the wreckage a man who 
turns out to be no other than Alan Breck Stewart. The 
author made shift to navigate the Covenant along this intri- 
cate course, because he could recall a tour of those waters 
which he himself had made, at the age of eighteen, in the 
steam yacht Pharos, which was employed upon the service 




SKERRYVORE" — BOURNEMOUTH 



" Skerry vore is a two-story villa of yellow 
brick, overgrown with ivy, and capped with 
EQany high-pitched gables of blue slate. It turns 
its back to the road, and overlooks a garden 
which scrambles over the edge of the ravine." 
—Page 64. 



THE REST OF SCOTLAND 39 

of the Commissioners of Northern Lights. The Covenant is 
ultimately wrecked upon the coast of Mull, and the hero is 
cast lonely on the Isle of Earraid. This little island played 
a singularly prominent part in Stevenson's career; and all 
faithful students of his work should visit it. 

To reach this tiny isle from Edinburgh, the modern trav- 
eller may be advised to proceed to Glasgow through the 
Trossachs, and to follow thence the common track of tourists 
through the Crinan Canal to Oban. Oban, which is not un- 
justly celebrated as a sort of little Naples of the north, is the 
most convenient centre for a series of excursions on the trail 
of Alan Breck and David Balfour after they are cast ashore 
in Kidnapped. 

In Oban you will hear no word of Earraid, for the little 
island has no fame outside the works of R. L. S. ; but if you 
will entrust yourself to the excursion steamer that sails daily 
around the island of Mull, calling for an hour at Staffa and 
for another hour at lona, you will be transported within a 
few hundred yards of the unhomely coast of Earraid and will 
be enabled to observe it at your leisure. 

"The little Isle of Earraid lies close in to the southwest 
corner of the Ross of Mull; the sound of lona on one side, 
across which you may see the isle and church of Columba; 
the open sea to the other, where you shall be able to mark, 
on a clear, surfy day, the breakers running white on many 
sunken rocks:" it is thus described by R. L. S. in his Me- 
moirs of an Islet. The island is at present denuded of any hu- 
man habitation; but it had a temporary population of one 
hundred and twenty-two when Louis spent three weeks 
upon it in the summer of 1870. The Dhu Heartach light- 



40 



ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 



house, ''fifteen miles away to seaward," was at that time 
being constructed by his "family of engineers "; and R. L. S., 
who had not yet renounced the profession of his forebears, 
was serving at this temporary post of Earraid as a sort of 
amateur apprentice. 

This whole experience is detailed, with even more than his 
accustomed felicity in sheer description, in the Memoirs of 
an Islet; but, in the introduction to this essay, R. L. S. re- 
minds us that he had already written of Earraid twice before. 
''I put a whole family there," he says, "in one of my tales; 
and later on threw upon its shores and condemned to sev- 
eral days of rain and shellfish on its tumbled boulders the 
hero of another." 

The first tale referred to in this sentence is, of course. The 
Merry Men, In this novelette the actual island is ficti- 
tiously named "Aros" and the Ross of Mull is called the 
"Ross of Grisapol"; but the forlorn and terrifying aspect of 
the sea-beleaguered islet repeats exactly the impression pro- 
duced by Earraid on the traveller to-day. The "great 
granite rocks" may still be noted from the deck of the ex- 
cursion steamer, to "go down together in troops to the sea 
like cattle on a summer's day. . . . On calm days you 
can go wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes 
following you about the labyrinth; but when the sea is up. 
Heaven help the man that hears that cauldron boiling." 

In Kidnapped, Stevenson has called the island by its actual 
name; and the traveller will poignantly appreciate the tragic 
loneliness of David Balfour as he picked his way among those 
barren boulders, since the aspect of Earraid is to this day 
intolerably desolate. 



THE REST OF SCOTLAND 41 

From this thrice-celebrated Isle of Earraid, David Balfour 
makes his way, across the adjacent island of Mull, to Loch 
Aline in Morven; and thence, traversing the Linnhe Loch, is 
set down in the Appin country. This trail may be clearly 
traced upon the map that is bound up with the tale of Kid- 
napped; but only a very hardy adventurer would attempt to 
follow it on foot to-day. 

It is easy, however, to proceed by boat or coach from the 
tourist centre of Oban to Duror in the Appin country, 
which is close to the scene of that historic murder which cuts 
so large a figure in the tale of Kidnapped; or else, the general 
region may be explored approximately enough if the trav- 
eller will follow the usual tourist route by steamer to the 
headwaters of Loch Etive and thence by coach, over the 
pass of Glencoe, to the slate-gray town of Ballachulish. 

To follow afoot the subsequent wanderings of David and 
Alan through the heather, the traveller must be willing to 
undergo considerable hardship. The mountains of the 
Appin country and of the neighbouring district of Glencoe are 
neither very high nor very harsh; but the whole locality is 
unutterably lonely. You may tramp all day through the in- 
hospitable heather without encountering a single human hab- 
itation; and to plunge into that Highland wilderness, with 
the nearest food and shelter nearly thirty miles away, requires 
a daring that is not demanded of a f oot-f arer over the more 
closely populated trails of Switzerland. 

VII 

A separate excursion must be made, from either Inver- 
ness or Edinburgh, in order to visit the three remaining 



42 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

towns of Scotland whose names are written with the largest 
letters in Stevenson's biography. 

Readers of the reminiscent essay entitled My First Book 
— Treasure Island will naturally wish to visit Braemar, 
where "on a chill September morning, by the cheek of a 
brisk fire, and the rain drumming on the window," he began 
that classic book for boys that made his fortune and his 
fame. It was here, at the close of the inclement summer of 
1881, that, in a high ''tide of delighted industry," he "turned 
out fifteen chapters" of Treasure Island at the rate of a 
chapter a day; and it was here that the tale was first read to 
Mr. Edmund Gosse, and to Dr. A. H. Japp, who ultimately 
sold it to Mr. Henderson, the editor of Young Folks. 

Braemar is a comfortable hamlet in the Grampians, not 
far from the royal residence of Balmoral. You take a train 
from Aberdeen to Ballater, and complete the journey by 
coach. The River Dee roars rushing through Braemar; 
and as you linger on the little bridge at night and watch the 
lamplight flicker from the windows of a hundred cottages 
that are scattered haphazard over the surrounding hills, 
you will tell yourself that here was indeed a fitting place to 
imagine a tale of "all the old romance, retold exactly in the 
ancient way." It is thoroughly characteristic of Stevenson 
that the chapters written at Braemar were set in the south- 
west of England; since, as the reader has already been 
reminded, he never could see any locality with artistic 
clearness unless he was writing at a definite distance from it. 

It is a long but lovely drive from Braemar to the railway 
that will lead the pilgrim to Pitlochry. Here, in a wooded 
incision through the Highlands that is carved by the River 




MENTONE. FROM THE JETTY 



"Stevenson was in Mentone for the first two 
months of 1863, and again from Christmas, 1863, 
to May, 1864. It was the first foreign place that 
ever interested him. To Mentone he returned 
ten years later, when he was 'ordered south' in 
November, 1873. There he imbibed a love of 
the luxurious southland that was needed to com- 
plete a nature that had been cradled among the 
winds and winters of the north." — Page 80. 



THE REST OF SCOTLAND 43 

Tummel, is situated Kinnaird Cottage, where Stevenson 
lived for two months in the summer of 1881, before moving 
onward to Braemar. It was here that he wrote Thrawn 
Janet, The Merry Men, and The Body Snatcher, all three of 
which were first intended as contributions to a volume of 
supernatural tales in which the tone of terror should be em- 
phasized. It is not difficult for the traveller to imagine 
how a rainy summer at Pitlochry might turn an author's 
mind to brooding on the mood of terror, for the aspect of 
the neighbourhood is wild and dark and haunted; but that 
Louis saw it sometimes in another mood is indicated by 
a passage in his Letters, in which he describes the locality 
in these lyric terms: "A little green glen with a burn, a 
wonderful burn, gold and green and snow-white, singing 
loud and low in different steps of its career, now pouring 
over miniature crags, now fretting itself to death in a 
maze of rocky stairs and pots; never was so sweet a little 
river. Behind, great purple moorlands reaching to Ben 
Vrackie." 

The next summer, 1882, Stevenson spent a full month at 
Kingussie, a little mountain resort upon the River Spey, 
which is situated about forty miles northward from Pit- 
lochry. It can be reached directly from the latter town by 
rail. "The golden burn that pours and sulks in the den 
behind Kingussie" is particularly singled out for celebration 
at the outset of the essay entitled Pastoral. The month 
that Louis passed within hearing of this burn was the last 
full month that he ever passed in Scotland; and it was here 
that, according to his habit of heeding the poet's precept 
that "distance lends enchantment to the view," he wrote 



44 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

most of the merry tale of The Treasure of Franchard, whose 
scenes are set in the Forest of Fontainebleau. 

Kingussie is now overgrown with many monstrous villas 
of recent erection, and Sir Sidney Colvin has assured me 
that the place has utterly been spoiled since that summer 
of 1882 which he spent there in company with Stevenson; 
but the pilgrim who will wander toward the golf-course 
through the wooded and secluded den where the lisping 
burn still ''pours and sulks" over the ineffectual stones that 
seek to dam its course may still catch some echo of that far- 
off music that made melody in the ears of R. L. S. when he 
lolled and dreamed by Speyside over thirty years ago. 



Chapter Thbee 
ENGLAND 



I 



CHAPTER THREE 
ENGLAND 



Stevenson's attitude toward England was noticeably differ- 
ent from his attitude toward any of the other countries 
that he lived in. It was the only land in which he felt him- 
self a foreigner. He was always easily at home in France; 
he made himself quite readily at home in the United States; 
and, even in the South Sea Islands, he found no diflSculty in 
accustoming himself to conditions of life as far removed as 
possible from those of his ancestral Scotland. But in 
England he was never easily and utterly at home. He was 
living in a land of strangers. Neither the English country 
nor the English people seemed to belong to him, like the 
French, the Californian, the Samoan. He was never so 
consciously and so emphatically Scottish as when he had 
crossed the border into that very different country that lay 
only fifty miles to the southward of his native Edinburgh. 

He felt no antipathy to England — merely a smiling con- 
sciousness of his inability to appreciate and to assimilate it. 
Other countries he could call his own, but England remained 
somehow a country of the other people. He never became 
a part of it; and, in consequence, it never became a part of 
him. A nameless friend of mine, when he was only twenty- 
one, wrote (with what seems to me a fine flourish) in his 

47 



48 



ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 



diary: "Naples is a part of me now; and I am bigger by a 
city." Louis might have written thus of Paris or of San 
Francisco. Strangely enough he could never have written in 
similar terms of London. 

His sense of England as a foreign country may be traced 
back to his childhood. In the autumn of 1863, he passed 
a single term at a boarding-school kept by a certain Mr. 
Wyatt in Spring Grove, Isleworth, near London. In after 
years, his only recollection of this experience was a sense of 
the essential difference between the English and the Scottish 
schoolboy. "The boy of the South," he tells us, "seems 
more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to 
games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily 
transported by imagination; the type remains with me as 
cleaner in mind and body, more active, fonder of eating, 
endowed with a lesser and a less romantic sense of life 
and of the future, and more immersed in present circum- 
stances." 

This consciousness of the foreign quality of England and 
the English became most clearly formulated in Stevenson's 
mind in the summer of 1873, when he was visiting his cousin, 
Mrs. Churchill Babington, at Cockfield Rectory, at Sud- 
bury, in Suffolk. In a letter to his mother, sent from Sud- 
bury on July 28th, he said: "I cannot get over my aston- 
ishment — indeed, it increases every day — at the hopeless 
guff that there is between England and Scotland, and Eng- 
lish and Scotch. Nothing is the same; and I feel as strange 
and outlandish here as I do in France and Germany. Every- 
thing by the wayside, in the houses, or about the people, 
strikes me with an unexpected unf amiliarity : I walk among 




AVIGNON — CATHEDRAL AND PALACE OF THE POPES 



"I have just read your letter upon the top of 
the hill beside the church and the castle. . . . 
I turned back as I went away; the white Christ 
stood out in strong relief on His brown cross 
against the blue sky, and the four kneeling an- 
gels and lanterns grouped themselves about the 
foot wath a symmetry thatwas almost laughable." 
—Letter of R.L.S. to Mrs. SiiwelL—Fsige 80. 



ENGLAND 49 

surprises, for just where you think you have them, some- 
thing wrong turns up." 

Here, as Sir Sidney Colvin has remarked, we find the 
germ of the essay called The Foreigner at Home, which was 
published nine years later in the Cornhill Magazine. It is a 
significant fact that when Stevenson, in 1887, collected his 
autobiographical papers into the volume entitled Memories 
and Portraits, he set this essay in the forefront of the book 
and caused it to serve as a sort of preface to all that fol- 
lowed. Thereby he forced the reader to realize at once that 
Scotland, and not England, was the source of those adven- 
tures of the mind to be commemorated. 

"A Scotchman" — he tells us in this essay — "may tramp 
the better part of Europe and the United States, and never 
again receive so vivid an impression of foreign travel and 
strange lands and manners as on his first excursion into 
England. The change from a hilly to a level country 
strikes him with delighted wonder. Along the flat horizon 
there arise the frequent venerable towers of churches. He 
sees at the end of airy vistas the revolution of the windmill 
sails. . . . The warm, habitable age of towns and 
hamlets, the green, settled, ancient look of the country; 
the lush hedgerows, stiles and privy pathways in the fields; 
the sluggish, brimming rivers; chalk and smock-frock; chimes 
of bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding English speech — 
they are all new to the curiosity. . . . The sharp edge 
of novelty wears off; the feeling is scotched, but I doubt 
whether it is ever killed." 

With Stevenson himself, this sense of the novelty of 
England was never killed; but, oddly enough, instead of 



50 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

stimulating his mind to a more curious alertness of observa- 
tion, it led him to relinquish any active effort to look at 
England as the English do. Some people are most inter- 
ested by countries that they cannot understand : it was not so 
with Stevenson. England always baffled him; and, though 
he often travelled through that foreign country, he never suc- 
ceeded in seeing it. 

This point is especially important, because it explains the 
notable neglect of England in the works of R. L. S. In his 
literature of travel, he has devoted entire volumes to France, 
like An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey; he has 
devoted separate volumes to America, like Across the Plains 
and The Silverado Squatters; and he has written other vol- 
umes to record his voyages among the South Sea Islands: 
but in his entire lifetime he never published so much as a 
single essay in celebration of an English scene. 

Several of his stories are localized, of necessity, in Eng- 
land; but, in these stories, the background is shadowy and 
vague. The setting is not so clearly observed, so lucidly 
delineated, as that of the other tales that are localized in 
Scotland or America or France or the islands of the far 
Pacific. Even in his works of fiction, Stevenson writes of 
England like one who had never seen the country. Oculists 
inform us that there is a blind spot in the retina; and it is 
an interesting fact that the seeing eye of Stevenson was only 
blind when it was turned at England. 

II 

After Stevenson's death, there was found among his 
papers an unpublished fragment of an essay on Cockermouth 



ENGLAND 51 

and Keswick; and this fragment was included by Sir Sidney 
Colvin in the definitive edition of his works. It was written 
as far back as 1871, when the author was a Httle less than 
twenty-one years old. The mere occurrence of the names 
of two noted English towns in the title of a posthumous es- 
say by R. L. S. would be sufiicient to arrest the curiosity; 
but this curiosity will be increased by a study of the 
text. 

At the very outset of this paper, the reader will encounter 
a downright exposition by Stevenson himself of his mental 
habit of relying on his memory to select and to compose 
subconsciously the essential details of any scene he might 
be tempted to store up in his mind for subsequent descrip- 
tion. There is no other single paragraph in all his writ- 
ings which affords us such an illuminative indication of 
his special method of attaining that perspective by which 
alone description may become a fine art. So important is 
this paragraph that it must be quoted in entirety: 

Very much as a painter half closes his eyes so that some salient unity 
may disengage itseK from among the crowd of details, and what he sees 
may thus form itseK into a whole; very much on the same principle, I 
may say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to intervene between any 
of my little journey ings and the attempt to chronicle them. I cannot 
describe a thing that is before me at the moment, or that has been before 
me only a very little while before; I must allow my recollections to get 
thoroughly strained free from all chaff till nothing be except the pure 
gold; allow my memory to choose out what is truly memorable by a 
process of natural selection; and I piously believe that in this way I 
ensure the Survival of the Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or if 
I am obliged to write letters during the course of my little excursion, I 
so interfere with the process that I can never again find out what is 
worthy of being preserved, or what should be given in full length, what in 
torso, or what merely in profile. 



52 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

It is a pity that the foregoing passage should be so little 
known; for it deserves to be pondered deeply by all students 
of the craft of writing. 

At the outset of Stevenson's account of Cockermouth, we 
find the earliest of all his written records of the bewilder- 
ing difference between England and his native country: — *'I 
was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cocker- 
mouth, and did not raise my head until I was fairly in the 
street. When I did so, it flashed upon me that I was in 
England; the evening sunlight lit up English houses, Eng- 
lish faces, an English conformation of street — as it were, an 
English atmosphere blew against my face. There is noth- 
ing perhaps more puzzling (if one thing in sociology can ever 
really be more unaccountable than another) than the great 
gulf that is set between England and Scotland — a gulf so 
easy in appearance, in reality so difficult to traverse." 

After this introduction, the reader might logically expect 
a careful observation of those features of the town by virtue 
of which it seemed definitively English; but, instead, he will 
discover that Stevenson chose rather to dismiss this foreign- 
looking little city without observing it at all. Cockermouth 
was the birthplace of William Wordsworth, and most tour- 
ists who visit the town have Wordsworth in their eye; but 
there is no indication in this essay that Stevenson was aware 
that the little winding streets he traversed had been trod by 
a very great observer who had made that countryside pe- 
culiarly his own. How different from this insensibility was 
the eagerness with which R. L. S. explored and celebrated 
every small locality in Edinburgh which could be at all con- 
nected with the career of the comparatively minor Scottish 



ENGLAND 53 

poet, Robert Fergusson! Instead of describing Words- 
worth's Cockermouth, Stevenson regales us with a detailed 
account of a casual meeting with a delectable "Canadian 
Felt Hat Manufacturer," who bore the unpoetic name of 
Smethurst. 

He tells us also that he went unwillingly to Keswick, 
merely because a waitress in his inn at Cockermouth had 
summarily insisted on his doing so. There is no mention of 
Robert Southey in his account of Keswick; but this omission 
need no longer seem surprising to more traditionally tutored 
visitors. But the fact is still surprising that Stevenson re- 
mained as blind to Keswick as he had been to Cockermouth. 
There is no more famous view in England than the view of 
Derwentwater from the wooded little promontory that juts 
southerly from Keswick into the lapping waters of the lake. 
Louis leads us to this very point of view: the spot, indeed, 
may be identified by future travellers as standing within a 
stone's throw of the monument which has been erected, in 
recent years, to Ruskin : but instead of describing the pano- 
ramic glory of the greatest of the English Lakes, he chooses 
rather to describe a trio of young girls he met in this idyllic 
spot, pirouetting in a raffle of wind-driven drapery. His 
choice is just enough, as a matter of mere art : the charm of 
the girls appeared to him more potent than the charm of 
Derwentwater : but the point for us at present to observe is 
that Louis would have chosen otherwise if the background 
had been furnished by Loch Lomond or Loch Katrine. 

In only one other essay besides this posthumous paper on 
Cockermouth and Keswick does Stevenson mention any par- 
ticular localities in England. This sole exception to the 



54 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

rule is the piece entitled An Autumn Effect, which first ap- 
peared in the Portfolio for April and May, 1875, and was not 
included in his collected works till after his death. In this 
paper, which celebrates a walking trip through Buckingham- 
shire, he refers by name to Wendover and Tring, High 
Wycombe and Great Missenden. None of these towns, 
however, is carefully observed; the author's purpose, in this 
paper, is merely to catch the note of a certain moment in the 
gradual procession of the seasons; and to all intents and | 

purposes, this autumnal picture might have been set, just I' 

as effectively, in France. X 

III * 

Stevenson's lack of active interest in the look of English 
towns seems all the more surprising when we remember that, 
every time he travelled down from Edinburgh to London, he 
must have passed through such a memorable place as Dur- 
ham. Many a time, as the train paused at Durham station, 
he must have looked, over the intervening valley, at that 
manliest of all cathedrals, seated high upon a hill and guarded | 

by a mediaeval castle. Even the most fleeting view of that 
tremendous hilltop from a railway window is a sight to be 
remembered ever afterward; but there is no record that 
Louis ever noticed or remembered it. He was not so blind 
in Scotland; he was not so blind in France or California; but 
in England he seems always to have shut his eyes. He never 
mentions York, another town that he must frequently have 
traversed on the way from his own northern city of the winds 
to the more propitiatory cities of the south. York — with 
its ancient walls and battlemented gates, its quaint and ram- | 



^a^^'' ' iziv- 











PARIS— THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS 



"Stevenson's reminiscence of these appren- 
tice years in Paris (his lehrjahre, to use Goethe's 
word) is chronicled in the early chapters* of The 
Wrecker, wherein we may read of his enthusiasm 
for the Boul' Miche', and Roussillon wine, and 
the Luxembourg Gardens, and Lavenue's, and 
the Rue de Rennes, and the shadowy Hotel de 
Cluny."— Page 87. 



I 



ENGLAND 55 

bling streets, its towered Minster — he never saw, or never 
cared to see. It was only — so to speak — another town of 
England; and England was nothing but a foreign country 
where one never felt at home. 

Two features, only, of the English countryside are cele- 
brated with enthusiasm in the works of Stevenson: first, 
English roads, and second, English taverns. His mind was 
particularly captivated by the legendary pageant of the 
Great North Road, over which the tide of travel had swept 
for many centuries northward to his native Edinburgh. 
During his residence at Bournemouth, in 1884, Stevenson 
began a novel which was called The Great North Road; and 
he had written eight chapters before he laid aside the pen 
in order to prepare The Dynamiter for the press. Later in 
his life he returned to the haunting prospect of this highway 
and used it as the setting for several of the chapters of St. 
Ives, 

Stevenson's love of the homely and hospitable charm of 
English taverns is also evidenced in St. Ives^ and in many of 
his other works of fiction. Several legendary English inns 
are celebrated in The Black Arrow; and in The Body Snatcher 
there is a careful and elaborate description of a tavern called 
"'The George," at Debenham. A vivid picture of tavern 
life in eighteenth-century England is exhibited in the opening 
chapters of Treasure Island, which are set on the southern 
shore of Bristol Channel. I can find no indication in the 
records of the author's life that he was personally acquainted 
with Bristol and the adjacent seaboard; but, having tramped 
afoot through that locality myself, I can testify to the essen- 
tial accuracy of Stevenson's descriptions. Every proper tale 



56 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

of pirates must begin, as a matter of course, in the immediate 
environment of Bristol; and an author bent on writing "all 
the old romance, retold exactly in the ancient way" could 
easily borrow the traditional setting from his many prede- 
cessors. 

The Black Arrow is the only one of Stevenson's many tales 
that attempts to recall the historic past of England; and 
this book, as the author playfully confessed in the dedication 
to his wife, must be regarded as his greatest failure in the 
art of fiction. The action is localized, of necessity, in Tun- 
stall Forest: but the scenery is merely /'tushery" — to use 
the author's word — and cannot be accepted as a serious at- 
tempt to paint a picture of provincial England as it appeared 
in the high and far-off times of Henry VI. 

Of one actual English tavern our author appears to have 
been particularly fond. The inn at Burford Bridge, ''with 
its arbours and green garden and silent, eddying river," is 
coupled, in A Gossip on Romance, with the Hawes Inn at 
Queensferry as a place that is pregnant with potential narra- 
tive. "The inn at Burford Bridge — though it is known al- 
ready as the place where Keats wrote some of his Endymion 
and Nelson parted from his Emma — still seems to wait the 
coming of the appropriate legend. Within these ivied walls, 
behind these old green shutters, some further business smoul- 
ders, waiting for its hour. ... I have lived at the 
Hawes and the Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, 
as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify the place. 
. . . The man or the hour had not yet come; but . . • 
some frosty night a horseman, on a tragic errand, [shall] rattle 
with his whip on the green shutters of the inn at Burford." 



ENGLAND 57 

Louis lived twice at this haunted and historic tavern — in 
April, 1878, and again in April, 1882. On both occasions 
his immediate motive was to visit George Meredith, whose 
home, near the neighbouring hamlet of Dorking, was — in the 
inspired phrase of Sir James Matthew Barrie — "the throne 
of letters in this country." On the first occasion — being far 
enough from London and from Paris — Louis wrote several 
of the stories in the New Arabian Nights; but, unfortunately 
for posterity, he never subsequently tried a rattle at the 
shutters of the inn at Burford Bridge. This tavern may still 
be visited by literary pilgrims. A tall cliflf overlooks it from 
the rear, and there is a little wash of water in the foreground. 
The house has been "improved" and "modernized"; but it 
is not difficult to imagine away the renovations and to recall 
it as it must have looked when Louis lived there. 

Toward the end of The Wrecker there is a lovely descrip- 
tion of an imaginary English town called Stalbridge; but it 
is characteristic of R. L. S. that this locality should be 
described from the point of view of a foreign visitor — in this 
case, an American. The " Carthew Arms," at Stalbridge-le- 
Carthew, is a typical English tavern of the kind that Louis 
loved; but his shadowy account of Stalbridge Minster is the 
only passage in all his work that suggests to us that he ever 
felt and understood the charm of any of the great cathedrals 
which make the little sea-girt isle of England a Mecca of in- 
numerable pilgrims from innumerable lands. 

IV 

Stevenson's almost utter lack of interest in London is more 
remarkable than his apparent insensibility to the visual as- 



58 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

pects of the English countryside. He made many fleeting 
visits to the capital — especially during the impressionable 
decade of his twenties; but he was never allured to make any 
deliberate effort to explore the most intricately interesting 
of all the cities of the modern world. Any American college 
youth who has spent two weeks in London with a guide- 
book has seen more of the city than Louis ever noticed and 
observed in his entire lifetime. He knew every stone of 
Edinburgh; he knew both modern and mediaeval Paris like a 
book; he could have drawn from memory a map of San Fran- 
cisco; but it never seems to have occurred to him that it 
might be interesting to study St. Bartholomew's the Great or 
to visit the sacred sanctuary of St. Saviour's, Southwark. 

There is such a thing as Thackeray's London or the Lon- 
don of Dickens; but there is no such thing as Stevenson's 
London. LTnlike most of the British novelists of the nine- 
teenth century, he has left us no picture and no vision of the 
capital. To Stevenson, London meant merely the Savile 
Club; '*the Monument," as he picturesquely called the 
official residence of Sir Sidney Colvin in the east wing of 
the British Museum; the home of Mr. Edmund Gosse; a few 
Bohemian restaurants in the district of Soho; and the more 
frequented streets immediately adjacent to Trafalgar Square. 
He may, perhaps, have visited such a famous haunt of 
tourists as The Temple; but, if so, we have no record of 
the fact. ^ 

Most of Stevenson's friends had interests in London. He 
went there to see them, not to see the city. The experience 
was a little — let us say — like meeting an old schoolmate on j | 

the doorstep of the Mosque at Cordoba and therefore never t 



ENGLAND 59 

entering the Mosque. All he cared about in London was 
the talk and talkers of the town — the Talk and Talkers he 
has celebrated in two of his most brilliant essays. 

He is still remembered as a formerly familiar figure at the 
Savile Club. This club, which takes its name from its 
original house at No. 15 Savile Row, is now situated in Picca- 
dilly, opposite the Green Park. More than any other club in 
London, it approximates the atmosphere of The Players 
in New York. Most of the members are actively engaged 
or eagerly interested in one or another of the arts; and this 
mutual interest in the things that count is accepted, in lieu 
of any formal introduction, as a cue for conversation within 
the precincts of the club. 

When the Savile Club was founded, in 1869, Sir Sidney 
Colvin was among the men most active in its organization; 
and the fact is pointed out to recent members that the in- 
itials of the club are the same as those of this prince of 
gentlemen and scholars. Proposed by Sir Sidney, Ste- 
venson was elected to the Savile after only six weeks of pro- 
bation, on June 3d, 1874; and thereafter the club became his 
home in London. 

It has been a pleasant privilege of the present writer to 
be received as an Honorary Member of the Savile Club, 
and to meet many of the men who still remember Stevenson. 
After luncheon, it is the custom to retire for coffee and cigars 
to the billiard-room — an L-shaped hall with leather cush- 
ions, behind the dining-room. Here, in the comfortable 
atmosphere of after-table talk, I have listened to many tales 
of Louis, in his black shirt and velvet jacket, gesticulating 
eagerly and shaking his long and unkempt hair, while he 



60 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

made the little circle in the midst of which he talked a mo- 
mentary centre of the universe. 

It is significant, however, that Stevenson's essays on 
Talk and Talkers are the only ones that may be said to have 
been inspired by his experience of London. To him, the 
Savile Club was more important than the city. He was 
right, of course, from his particular point of view; but this i 

point of view was scarcely to be expected from one who was 
destined to become a great novelist. 

Stevenson never used London as a setting for his works 
of fiction except when the exigencies of the narrative de- 
manded a background that was vast and vague. He knew 
nothing, and cared nothing, about the memorable history 
of the great metropolis. He has set a tale in mediaeval 
Paris, and minutely explored the Edinburgh of the eigh- | 

teenth century in two historical romances; but he never 
mentions London except in stories that are contemporary 
with himself. His London — if he may be said to have a 
London — ^has no past; nor is it even clearly and distinctly 
drawn from the point of view of an appreciator in the 
present. 

The New Arabian Nights are set, for the most part, in 
contemporary London, because a matter-of-fact and strictly ? 

modern setting would most accentuate the ironic quality of ' 

the fantastic in the narratives themselves; but the localities 
of London that are specifically mentioned might all be 
visited by an enterprising tourist within a single hour. 
Leicester Square, Rupert Street, Soho, Trafalgar Square, j ^ 

and the little streets that run riverward through the Adelphi 1 1 

district from the Strand, are so well-known to every traveller * 



|«^.rvii-:.l'V.v^.i»^:j'/«-iW 



,*-;^5;V<v5v>?T':V^*^-"""^^^^*'''*"^^'^-^- 



,i^v3!;.jift^rt'JS«^?f^;^v?^: .i^ 







THE HEART OF THE LATIN QUARTER — ACROSS THE 
PLACE DE RENNES FROM LAVENUE'S 



"Mr. Will H. Low, to whom The Wrecker was 
dedicated, has informed us that nearly all the in- 
cidents recorded in those scenes which are local- 
ized in the Latin Quarter were recalled from 
actual occurrences in Stevenson's Parisian days." 
—Page 87: 



ENGLAND 61 

that it seems scarcely worth while for Stevenson to have 
pointed them out at all. 

Even when he mentions such familiar localities as these, 
his memory is not always accurate. For instance, any 
tourist will notice that the parapet of Trafalgar Square is 
scarcely high enough to insure the instant death of any one 
who might be flung summarily to the flagstones below. 
"Box Court" is merely a fictitious name; but the traveller 
(under a pretence of seeking rooms) may still explore the 
Craven Hotel, in Craven Street, which was selected by the 
author as the scene of the misadventures of Silas Q. Scud- 
damore with the Saratoga trunk. This hotel is very dingy, 
very musty, and a little tragical; and those who visit it 
to-day will scent a hint of secret corpses behind doorways. 

From a single phrase of Markheim, in which we are told 
that the hero longs "to plunge into a bath of London mul- 
titudes," we infer that the shop of the murdered dealer is 
situated in the capital. Otherwise, this greatest of all 
Stevenson's short-stories might be conceived to happen^ — 
like the tales of Edgar Allan Poe — "out of space, out of 
time." 

I have often wondered why the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll 
and Mr, Hyde was set in London instead of Edinburgh. 
Utterson is a very Scottish sort of lawyer; Lanyon is a very 
Scottish sort of doctor; and the metaphysical speculation 
that allures Dr. Jekyll to his doom is decidedly more Scot- 
tish than English. Furthermore, the tale might most ap- 
propriately be conceived as happening among the gloomy 
doorways and mysterious wynds that undermine the tall, de- 
caying lands which darkly overhang the High Street of 



62 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

Edinburgh. Possibly Louis may have felt that Mr. Hyde 
could lose himself more easily among the shifting crowds of 
a vaster and less centred city. It is more difficult to hunt 
a villain down in London than in Edinburgh. 

But the London that hovers in the background of this 
grisly fable is nothing but a vacancy of lamp-lit streets or 
else a crowded city quenched in fog. No reader of this 
story who has never visited the capital knows any more of 
London than he knew before he read it. We are told that 
Lanyon lives in Cavendish Square. There is nothing notable 
in that: it is a square of doctors. We are told that Utter- 
son lives in Gaunt Street: but there is no such street in Lon- 
don. Hyde has lodgings in Soho : he would have, of course, 
since the district is comparatively disreputable. Dr. Jekyll 
lives in an unnamed square, the description of which seems 
to indicate vaguely that it is some such place as Lincoln's 
Inn Fields. It is in the Regent's Park that Dr. Jekyll 
suffers his involuntary transformation into the loathsome 
body of Mr. Hyde; and Hyde subsequently drives to an 
hotel in Portland Street. The name of London is mentioned 
only twice or thrice in the entire narrative; and none of the 
localities enumerated is described with any particularity of 
observation. Here is, indeed, a tale of London that might 
have been set, without the slightest loss of emphasis, in any 
other of the major cities of the world. 



The only place in England that Stevenson at any time 
could fairly call his home was Bournemouth, where he lived 
from September, 1884, to August, 1887. Bournemouth may 



ENGLAND 63 

be described, in his own phrase, as an "uncharted wilderness 
of villas" scattered over the hills which flank the valley of 
the Bourne — a peaceful little river which at this point slinks 
into the sea. It is a popular wintering-place for invalids. 
The salubrity of its climate is due mainly to the pine woods 
by which it is environed. The finest villas are in a suburb 
to the west, which is known as Branksome Park. Here the 
houses are hidden from each other by a thick entanglement 
of trees; and a luxuriant growth of rhododendrons, and sev- 
eral species of exotic-looking palms, afford a hint of the 
tropical to woods that seem a little out of place on the sea- 
board of the English Channel. The sandstone cliffs which 
fortify the forest from the sea are gashed at frequent in- 
tervals into deep ravines, or "chines." These sheltered 
gorges have an inland look, like little mountain valleys; 
though, close by, upon the beach, the sea is forever rustling 
and whispering along the sand. 

Though Louis spent three years in Bournemouth, he 
never looked about him in the place itself nor visited the 
points of interest in the adjacent countryside. Christ- 
church, to the east, and Wimborne, to the west, are rich in 
Norman and Early English architecture; but ill-health 
confined him for the most part to the house, and on the 
rare occasions when he ventured out of doors he does not 
seem to have felt the call of mediaeval minsters. 

Bournemouth is never referred to in his works, except 
in the first two chapters of The Wrong Box, where Brank- 
some woods and the East Station of the town are mentioned 
by name, but without particular description. These chap- 
ters were first drafted by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, who had 



64 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

been to school in Bournemouth before the family decided to 
settle there ; and it was probably from his incentive, instead 
of that of his stepfather, that the name of the place was 
perpetuated in the extravagant tale which was the first 
product of their collaboration. 

From September to November, 1884, the Stevensons occu- 
pied a lodging on the West Cliff called Wensleydale; from 
November, 1884, to April, 1885, they rented a furnished 
house in Branksome Park, named Bonallie Towers. Finally, 
in the Easter season of 1885, they moved into a house of their 
own, on the brink of Alum Chine, which had been purchased 
by Thomas Stevenson and presented as a special gift to his 
daughter-in-law. 

This was the only house, except Vailima, which Stevenson 
could ever call his own. He renamed it Skerry vore, in mem- 
ory of that deep-sea lighthouse, planted nearly thirty miles 
due westward of the Isle of Earraid, which was erected by his 
uncle, Alan Stevenson, in the six years from 1838 to 1844, and 
is still considered one of the most notable achievements of 
his "family of engineers." The christening was consecrated 
in a poem, which appears as Number XXXIV of Underwoods: 

For love of lovely words, and for the sake 
Of those, my kinsmen and my countrymen. 
Who early and late in the windy ocean toiled 
To plant a star for seamen, where was then 
The surfy haunt of seals and cormorants : 
I, on the lintel of this cot, inscribe 
The name of a strong tower. 



^ ^ 



Skerryvore is a two-story villa of yellow brick, overgrown 
with ivy, and capped with many high-pitched gables of blue fiS 



ENGLAND 65 

slate. It turns its back to the road, and overlooks a garden 
which scrambles over the edge of the ravine. When Steven- 
son settled here, in a house of his own, he experienced for the 
first time that sense of proprietorship which was destined to 
be developed, on a larger scale, in his later years at Vailima. 
In several of the poems in Underwoods — notably Numbers 
V, XVII, XXXIV, XXXV, and XXXVI, all of which are 
set at Skerry vore — he voices a sentiment of house and home 
— a sense of the essential poetry of feeling settled in some 
little corner of the world that is utterly one's own^ — that 
marks an interesting departure from the mere Bohemian 
vagabondage of his earlier years. 

VI 

The period of Stevenson's residence at Bournemouth 
affords us the most available opportunity for investigating 
two points which are of the utmost importance toward any 
final appreciation of his career. The first is his attitude 
toward money; and the second is the effect, upon his work, 
of his habitual ill-health. 

It is commonly assumed that Stevenson was required to 
encounter and to conquer greater difiiculties than those 
which have opposed the progress of the majority of other 
writers who have toiled for twenty years to teach themselves 
the delicate and lovely art of setting words alluringly to- 
gether. This assumption is, however, contradicted by the 
facts. 

In the first place, Louis never had to earn his living. He 
could afford, through all the years of his apprenticeship, to 
take his time. He never had to write against the ticking of 



66 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

the clock, to get an article to press in time to pay the rent 
and pay the butcher. Other men have toiled all day, 
throughout their twenties, as editors, or publishers, or 
teachers, and have subsequently toiled all night at their 
chosen and beloved craft of writing. Other men have 
taught themselves to write with dignity and beauty in tired 
hours desperately snatched from a dull routine of uncon- 
genial labour, devoted gladly to the task of keeping their 
parents from starvation and giving an education to their 
brothers and their sisters. Many of this uncomplaining 
legion of the tried and true have succeeded finally in writing J 

well; and the public that has lauded their success has never 
been told of all the dreary years behind it. 

Of this quite ordinary burden, Louis never knew the heavy 
and the weary weight. It was not till 1883, when he was 
nearly thirty-three years of age, that he ever earned as much 
as fifteen hundred dollars in a single year; and it was not till 
he was thirty-seven that his annual earnings, from his own 
unaided efforts, ever exceeded the sum of two thousand 
dollars. Nevertheless, he had ventured, at the age of 
twenty-nine, to marry a woman twelve years older than him- 
self, with two children in their teens. 

Through all this time he was supported by his father. 
Thomas Stevenson not only gave Skerry vore to Mrs. Steven- 
son; he also gave, and gave continuously, the current funds 
that were required for the maintenance of his son and of his 
son's adopted family. 

This point is by no means mentioned in reproach. We 
know from certain passages in the Lay Morals that Louis 
was keenly conscious that he owed a special debt to destiny 




WAl^e^ Hm.'V-- 



&^t-^..c.m^ 



MORET — THE TOWN GATE 



In the essay on Fontainehleau, Stevenson said, 
"Nemours and Moret, for all they are so pictu- 
resque, have been little visited by painters. 
They are, indeed, too populous; they have man- 
ners of their own, and might resist the drastic 
process of colonization." — Page 90. 



ri 



ENGLAND 67 

because he had been exempted from the common heritage of 
daily labour. Whenever he needed money, he wrote to his 
father; but he was fully aware of the special obligation to 
use the leisure thus so easily acquired to the best advantage of 
his craft. Though an only child — and, in a sense, a spoiled 
child — of independent parents, he remained at all times a 
good and faithful servant of his art. This is greatly to his 
credit; but, on the other hand, it is unsound to assume that 
his way was harder than that of the majority of other writers. 

When Louis somewhat rashly attempted to earn his own 
living in the winter of 1879-1880 [he was at that time twenty- 
nine years old], the attempt resulted in disastrous failure. 
Not only was he reduced at once to abject poverty; but his 
work underwent an appreciable falling-off in art, and his 
spirits, till then so buoyant, became tragically melancholy. 
He failed at every point — in business, in art, in spirit; and 
from this failure he was rescued only by the renewal of his 
allowance from his father. 

The only other time when he had to work for money was 
in the last two years of his life. He was now earning twenty 
thousand dollars a year; but it was not enough. He had 
borrowed a large sum from Mr. H. J. Moors, the South Sea 
trader, in order to establish himself at Vailima; the estate 
was exceedingly expensive, and the effort to meet his unusual 
financial obligations plunged him into that final melancholy 
which is so evident in his later letters from Vailima. He 
nearly died when he tried to earn his living in San Francisco; 
and it would not be apart from the point to state that he 
killed himself with overwork when he had to earn his living 
at Vailima. 



68 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

But apart from these two experiences, pitiable and terrible 
as they are, Stevenson was never called upon to feel the grip 
of poverty, to wrestle with it as the dauntless Hebrew wres- 
tled with the angel, and to fling it from him with a silent, un- 
selfconscious smile. 

Louis is lauded as a hero, because, despite all handicaps, he 
did his work and did it well. Being myseK a worshipper of 
heroes — ^for hero-worship is one of the few things that make 
our mortal life more worthy than it seems — I am happy to 
remove my hat and cheer with the majority. But let us not 
ignore the fact that, in one respect at least, the work of Ste- 
venson was made more easy than that of many a nameless and 
unnoted literary artist — true to his craft and true to his ideal 
of service — who is toiling against more desperate difficulties 
in New York or London at the present hour. 

VII 

There remains to be considered the question of Stevenson's 
ill-health. It is a curious fact that posterity has made a hero 
out of Louis, not because he always wrote well, but because 
he often wrote in bed. To write well is a great achieve- 
ment: never to write badly is indeed an intimation of im- 
mortality — an accomplishment so rare and noble as to call 
for the erection of monuments and the dedication of shrines : 
but when a man has done so big a thing as this, it seems im- 
pertinent and trivial for the public to consider whether he 
did it in bed or out of bed. 

Stevenson's health was never, at any other time, so bad 
as during the three years of his residence at Bournemouth. 
He was frequently in imminent danger of death from pul- 



ENGLAND 69 

monary hemorrhages. Often his right arm was bound up in 
a sHng, to impede him from his habit of violent gesticulation. 
Frequently he was forbidden to speak, and could communi- 
cate with his family only by signs and written words. For 
many days together he was forced to lie in bed. Yet, during 
this period, he wrote Kidnapped, the Strange Case of Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Olalla, and Markheim; he finished 
Prince Otto, The Dynamiter, and the Child's Garden of Verses; 
he collaborated with William Ernest Henley on Beau Austin, 
Admiral Guinea, and Macaire; he prepared the Memoir of 
Fleeming Jenkin, half a dozen of his finest essays, and most 
of Underwoods; he began The Great North Road; he made his 
studies for an unwritten Life of Wellington; and he undertook 
many other literary labours. This great achievement — 
fully worthy in itself of hero-worship, since good and faithful 
labour is the most inspiriting spectacle in life — has been 
trumpeted as particularly laudable because it was accom- 
plished by a man who might have died in mid-career at any 
hour. 

Louis might have died in Bournemouth. The fact is that 
he did not die. And the question remains whether the im- 
minence of death made it especially difficult for him to do his 
work. To this important question, the facts require that a 
negative answer should be returned. 

On one occasion, when I had examined the career of Ste- 
venson month by month and almost week by week, I discov- 
ered that he always worked most and worked best in those 
seasons when he was confined to his bed. Whenever he was 
well, he played and talked; whenever he was ill, he worked 
and wrote. From this observation of recorded facts, I was 



70 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

led to the logical surmise that the particular nature of his 
malady was such that, instead of impeding him, it helped 
him to devote his best attention to his art. This was the 
starting-point of an investigation which led to a careful 
questioning of many of his most intimate friends and to a 
consultation with the most noted of all the physicians who, 
at any time, had taken charge of him. 

The first result of this investigation was the discovery 
that although Louis might have bled to death at any mo- 
ment if he had ruptured an important artery, his malady 
was never painful and was never of a nature to depress his 
spirits. The imminence of sudden death, as R. L. S. him- 
self has told us in Aes Triplex, is never regarded seriously 
by those it threatens; and many specialists in lung diseases 
have assured me that their patients are ordinarily more spir- 
ited than men who are completely well. It seems to be 
established that the mind of Stevenson was more buoyant, 
more active, and more eager, when he was confined to his 
bed than when he was permitted to roam abroad in public. 
For one thing, his mind was of necessity disengaged from the 
normal interruption of many matters of minor interest, and 
was flung back into an enormous vacancy of leisure which 
it was called upon to render habitable by its own activity. 
For another thing, this disassociating process was never im- 
peded by the intrusion of pain. 

Stevenson himself has stated in his letters that never, in 
all his life, did he experience any sense of pain so acute as 
that which is reputed to arise from an ordinary toothache. 
One wonders whether he could have done his work so well 
under the dagger-thrusts of agony as he did it under the 




MONTI GNY-SUR-LOING 



" Stevenson was a great walker in these days, 
and explored not only the Forest of Fontaine- 
bleau itself, but all the towns of the adjacent 
countryside. The traveller who visits any of 
these entrancing little towns wdll find himself 
walking in the footsteps of R. L. S. They have 
been described for all time in the paper entitled 
Fontainebleau and the paper entitled Forest 
Notes." — Page 90. 



«' 



ENGLAND 71 

painless imminence of death. I have no desire to diminish 
the popular conception of his heroism. My desire is merely 
to define the nature of that heroism, and to emphasize 
the usually disregarded fact that, when he did his work in 
bed, the odds were just as often for him as against him. 

In that interesting Bournemouth period, when Steven- 
son did so much of his best work at a time when his health 
was undeniably at its lowest ebb, no other of his friends saw 
so much of him as Mr. Henry James. For this reason, I 
resolved, some years ago, to inquire of Mr. James whether 
or not it was easier, instead of harder, for Louis to work 
when he was ill than when he was comparatively well. 
At a conference which took place in the autumn of 1910, 
Mr. James, in reply to a series of direct questions, assured 
me (1) that Stevenson was never in pain, (2) that his mind 
was more easily active than usual when he was afflicted 
with pulmonary hemorrhages, and (3) that his consequent 
seclusion from the outside world actually helped him to per- 
form his labours, since at such times he was defended from 
all interruptions. 

These conclusions are my own; and, in stating that the 
testimony of Mr. James has aided me in making up my mind 
about this matter, I have no intention to burden his more 
ample shoulders with any responsibility for these assertions. 
To my own mind, however, it appears deplorable that Ste- 
venson should be worshipped as a hero because he wrote 
when he was ill — especially as the facts appear to indicate 
that, instead of hampering him, his illness actually aided 
him in the accomplishment of his labours. 

My own feeling is that Louis was a hero because he was 



72 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

that rare thing, a great artist, and that rarer thing, a great 
man. I remember at this moment a conversation with 
Cummy in regard to the memorial tablet by Saint-Gaudens 
that has been erected in St. Giles's Church in Edinburgh. 
I admired it as a work of art, thinking mainly of *'the god- 
like sculptor"; but Cummy stamped her foot, and swept 
the thing away with an impatient gesture. "Why will they 
be showing Master Lou in bed.'^" she said. *'I didn't love 
him because he was a sickly child ! " . . . 

VIII 

When Stevenson left Bournemouth, he left England and 
his native isle forever. He was only thirty-six; and the 
friends who saw him off on the steamship, Ludgate Hill, 
which sailed from London for New York on August 21st, 
1887, little realized that they were looking for the last time 
on his face. It was his destiny to sail beyond the sunset 
and the baths of all the western stars until he died. He had 
seen little of England that seemed worthy of remembrance 
when he was actively observing other lands; but he had 
done much of his best work in that alien but hospitable 
country, so actually near, so really far, from the land he al- 
ways loved and longed for as his home. 



Chapter Four 
FRANCE 



CHAPTER FOUR 
FRANCE 



Stevenson lived more freely, more fully, and more happily 
in France than in any other country. 

The word atmosphere is used in two senses — to indicate an 
essence absorbed by the lungs, and to indicate an essence 
absorbed by the spirit. In both senses, the atmosphere of 
France agreed with Stevenson. He sought health, from 
first to last, in many climes; but nowhere in Europe could he 
find it except in sunny France. In windy Scotland and in 
foggy England, he was condemned to linger for long periods 
in the Land of Counterpane; but in France he paddled a 
canoe and travelled with a donkey. He worked best when 
he was ill, but he played best when he was well; and Ste- 
venson was most himself in play -time. Those who know 
how to play are rarer and more precious than those who 
know how to work; and to meet Stevenson at his best (if one 
could make the clock tick backward and eliminate uncounted 
yesterdays) one would choose to meet him at Fontainebleau 
or at Hyeres. In these places he was well, and could lead a 
normal life; and there is nothing in the spirit of the man that 
could make one wish to meet him as an invalid. Concern- 
ing the state of Stevenson's health in France, the most val- 
uable testimony is that of Mr. Will H. Low, who first met 

75 



76 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

him in Paris in the spring of 1875. In that charming book, 
A Chronicle of Friendships, Mr. Low has said: "At this 
time, and during the three years that followed, I was never 
conscious that he was more than a little less robust than 
most of us were. ... At Barbizon he was among the 
foremost in our long walks over the plains or in the forest 
of Fontainebleau, and in the summers of 1876-77 at Grez, 
where he led a semi-amphibious life on and in the River 
Loing, he never seemed ill, and as youth is not solicitous 
on questions of health, it never occurred to us that his 
slender frame encased a less robust constitution than that of 
others." 

But in a deeper sense the atmosphere of France agreed 
with Stevenson. France is the most civilized of European 
countries. It is the mark of civilized people that they are 
able to understand you and to leave you alone; it is only the 
semi-civilized who endeavour to convert you to their way 
of thinking. Though Louis loved his native Edinburgh 
with a passionate, abiding love, he was never comfortable 
there after he had arrived at what may conveniently be 
called his years of indiscretion. To love Edinburgh is one 
thing — and any one must love at sight that queenliest of 
cities — but to love Edinburgh society is something very dif- 
ferent. As soon as the traveller settles in Edinburgh, his 
landlady will endeavour to amend his manners and to reform 
his religion. The semi-civilized inhabitants of that superb 
and haunting city can never understand you and will never 
leave you alone. The watchword of Edinburgh is Con- 
formity. But Louis was that rare thing, an individual — 
that is to say, a person capable of thinking his own thoughts. 




MONTIGNY-SUR-LOING 



"The Envoy to Underwoods was inspired l)y 
the hospitable aspect of Mr. Will H. Low's little 
garden at Montigny-sur-Loing." Stevenson 
said of it, in the essay on Fontainebleau, "Mon- 
tigny has been somewhat strangely neglected. 
I never knew it inhabited but once, when Will 
H. Low installed himself there with a barrel of 
piquette, and entertained his friends in a leafy 
trellis above the weir, in sight of the green coun- 
try, and to the music of the falling water. It 
was a most airy, quaint, and pleasant place of 
residence, just too rustic to be stagey." — Page 91. 



^ 



FRANCE 77 

feeling his own feelings, and living his own life, without imi- 
tating those around him. 

For an individual — as the type has been defined — the 
worst of all cities to grow up in is Edinburgh, and the best 
of all cities to grow up in is Paris. In Edinburgh, where 
everything is forbidden, the tendency of youths of genius 
is to burst their bars, and — to put the matter very frankly — 
to dash headlong to hell — where, at least, the company shall 
be neither respectable nor hypocritical. But in Paris, 
where nothing is forbidden, youths of genius may freely 
test their wings, without beating them against prison bars 
in desperation, and may learn, in their own God-given way, 
to think, to feel, to live. 

When Louis was floundering through the stormy seas of 
adolescence, Edinburgh never understood him. This is 
the reason — once more to put the matter very frankly — 
why, for a time, he hovered very near to dashing headlong 
to hell. But in Paris, the city of the free, he recovered his 
moral sanity. Instead of a conspiracy of citizens sol- 
emnly and hypocritically chanting *'Thou shalt not," he 
found a civilized society that permitted him to think out 
for himself the more profound, important problem of 
"Thou shalt." 

France is the second home of all the artists of the world. 
She teaches them to do their work by leaving them alone. 
They may dress as they choose, think as they choose, talk as 
they choose, act as they choose — ^provided only that they 
shall study to express, in their own way, the best that has 
been given them to say. In the atmosphere of France, Ste- 
venson could breathe and spread his wings; and not the least 



78 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

of reasons why he became the finest artist in recent EngUsh 
letters is the fact that throughout the formative period of his 
twenties he spent more time in France than in any other 
country. 

He was ordered first to France to seek for bodily health; 
and by a smiling and appropriate decree of destiny, it was 
there that he found that spiritual health of which he had 
stood more dangerously in need throughout the period of his 
more than usually stormy adolescence. In spirit he was a 
born Bohemian, in the best sense of the word — that is to 
say, he preferred the real life of the regions of the imagination 
to the merely actual and unimaginative life of church-going, 
heavy-drinking Edinburgh. He loved adventure; but ad- 
venture — which may be defined as an impulsive straying 
from the beaten path of humdrum, everyday existence — 
was a thing that Edinburgh frowned upon. A youth of 
genius cannot grow up healthily in an atmosphere of contin- 
ual nagging, any more than an able-minded child can grow up 
under the constant lashing of " Don't do that ! " To find his 
way to light and life, Louis needed to be free. The freest j 

country in the world is France. ! 

Stevenson was very proud of his purely Scottish ancestry; 
but he cherished also the legend of "a French barber- 
surgeon" who "landed at St. Andrews to tend the health 
and the beard of Cardinal Beaton" and was vaguely reputed 
to have been one of his progenitors. Indeed, both in Louis 
and in his cousin Bob, there were traits of character that can 
be defined by no other adjective than Gallic. Bob Steven- 
son — as Mr. Edmund Gosse once told me, though I do not 
think that he has ever stated so in print — was the original of 



FRANCE 7^ 

the young man with the cream tarts ; and that young man — 
though his absurd, intelHgent adventure is conducted in the 
neighbourhood of Leicester Square — is more easily thought 
of as a Parisian than as a Londoner. Louis was GaUic in his 
nimbleness of gesture, his mobiHty of face, his enthusiastic 
eloquence of conversation, his gaiety of spirit, his lust for 
freedom and adventure. It is not surprising that the French 
language came to him by a sort of second nature. His 
French was copious and fluent. It was never nicely gram- 
matical; but that was because he seized it as a living language 
to be spoken, not as a dead language to be learned from 
books. He could write well enough in French when the 
occasion called, as the reader may perceive in his letters to 
Rodin, and to Simoneau, the innkeeper of Monterey ; and he 
could. always read the language with no sense that it was 
foreign. It is a characteristic, though an accidental, fact 
that the first of all his published letters — written to his 
mother at the age of thirteen — starts out boldly in incorrect 
but fluent French. In every way, Louis was disposed by 
nature to feel more at home in France than in England — a 
country, as we have already noted, that was always foreign 

to him. 

II 

''The Rhone is the River of Angels," Stevenson once wrote 
to Mr. Low; "I have adored it since I was twelve and first 
saw it from the train." In the winter of 1862-63, the family 
had been ordered to the Riviera for reasons of health — his 
mother's health this time instead of his own — and this jour- 
ney gave the boy his first fleeting glimpse of France. The 
Stevensons were in Mentone for the first two months of 



80 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

1863, and again from Christmas, 1863, to May, 1864. Mean- 
while, in March, 1863, they made a tour of the principal 
cities of Italy. 

The Italian journey made no impression on the mind of 
Stevenson — a fact which goes to show that his faculty for 
observation was not yet awakened. Mentone, however, in 
which he remained for many months, he was able both to see 
and to remember. It was the first foreign place that ever 
interested him. 

To Mentone he returned ten years later, when he was 
"ordered south" in November, 1873. On arriving, he wrote 
a letter to his mother, dated on his birthday, in which he 
minutely described the changes which had taken place in the 
town during the course of the preceding decade. This let- 
ter is of peculiar interest to students of his mental develop- 
ment. Such apparently unimportant sentences as this — 
"The old chapel near Freeman's house at the entrance to the 
Gorbio valley is now entirely submerged under a shining new 
villa, with pavilion annexed" — by revealing the exactness of 
his memory of places seen at thirteen and not revisited till 
twenty-three, prove that, immediately after the trip to Italy, 
he developed that acute instinct for topography which is 
everywhere observable in the works of his maturity. 

The Riviera is the finest winter resort in the world. 
Town after town along this stretch of coast is made up en- 
tirely of villas and hotels. The climate is semi-tropical and, 
from fall to spring, propitious; and the coast is of extraor- 
dinary beauty. The maritime Alps, sinking southerly into 
green and rolling hills, here plunge headlong into the wide 
blue water of the Mediterranean. Juts of cliffy headland, 



FRANCE 81 

rounding into peninsulas or breaking off into islands, scallop 
the coast with harbours, and by these harbours are set vil- 
lages of villas, where invalids and idlers from the north come 
to bask beneath a winter sun. 

These towns, though differing in detail, are alike in all 
essential features. Each of them is a lazy, laughing, holiday 
casino of a place, careless, rich, and indolently lovely. Each 
has its promenade of palm trees along the waterside; each 
its boulevards for driving, its luring walks to hilltops com- 
manding wide vistas of the sea; each its glittering hotels and 
aristocratic villas. These villas, for the most part, are set in 
tropic gardens. In colour, the houses are toned to harmonize 
with the prevailing atmosphere. Mild tints predominate — 
rose and yellow, buff and skyey blue, amber and the green 
of budding leaves; and these gentle tones produce a visual 
melody which is scarcely rivalled elsewhere in the world. 

Such a place is Mentone. It is not surprising that Steven- 
son returned there for that winter of 1873-74, when he was 
weakest in body and weakest in spirit. The place was well 
adapted to relieve the state of mind that Louis analyzed so 
poignantly in the essay entitled Ordered South, which he 
wrote at Mentone during the period of his gradual recupera- 
tion. He did scarcely any other work there that was of any 
consequence; but he imbibed a love of the luxurious south- 
land that was needed to complete a nature that had been 
cradled among the winds and winters of the north. 

Ill 

It was at Mentone, early in 1874, that Sir Sidney Colvin 
introduced the late Andrew Lang to Stevenson. I shall 



82 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

never forget the account of this first meeting with R. L. S. 
which Mr Lang once gave me in his home in Kensington. 

Now that Mr. Lang has left us [to go golfing on Elysian 
hills, one likes to think], it may no longer seem ill-mannered 
for a younger man, who was no less fond of him than those 
who knew him better, to record the curious manner of his 
conversation. Mr. Lang was singularly inarticulate in talk. 
His utterance was discontinuous and jerky, and enunciated 
with an amiable growl. His speech was like his handwriting; 
and anybody who ever received a letter from him will know 
what that means. A letter from Mr. Lang looked as if a 
fly had dipped its feet in ink and ambled aimlessly over the 
paper: when he invited you to luncheon, you had to hand 
the note to an expert in chirography to determine whether 
the appointment were for Tuesday or for Thursday. In 
speaking, he seemed less to talk than to bark and grumble; 
but you loved him for this as you might love a noble-hearted 
St, Bernard. He did not talk in sentences, he growled in 
phrases. When another man would have said, "Will you 
have a cigarette .^^ " Mr. Lang said, " Cigarettes — over there." 
Instead of asking you to be seated, he would grumble, 
"Chair," and wave his hand. 

The reader is to use this as a sort of stage-direction in 
reading Mr. Lang's account of his first glimpse of Stevenson. 
I jotted it down from memory, in the London Underground, 
immediately after Mr. Lang had told it to me. 

"Mentone. Promenade. Saw him coming. Didn't like 
him. Long cape. Long hair. Queer hat. Damned queer. 
Hands : white, bony, beautiful. Didn't like the cape. Didn't 
like the hair. Looked like a damned sesthete. Never liked 





THE BRIDGE AT GREZ — MOONLIGHT 



" I have been three days at a place called Grez, 
a pretty and very melancholy \'illage on the 
plain. A low bridge, with many arches choked 
with sedge; green fields of white and yellow wa- 
ter-lilies, etc." — R. L. S. in a letter to his mother, 
—Page 91. 



FRANCE 83 

aesthetes. Can't stand them. Talked well. Saw that. Still 
seemed another aesthete Colvin had discovered. Didn't like 
him. Didn't like him at all. . . . Later — oh, yes^ — but 
I needn't tell you that. Didn't like him at first. Took time." 

But really to read this stenographic record, the reader 
must imagine something more^ — the great heart and deep 
humanity of Mr. Lang, the sense he always gave you of 
saying little because there was so much to say, the curious 
fascination of the pauses in his grumbling utterance, and the 
indefinable something that made you count the hours until 
you might be privileged to talk with him again. 

The most wholesome thing about this anecdote is that it 
punctures the illusion that everybody liked Louis Stevenson 
at sight — an illusion which has been fostered by all of his 
biographers. Mr. Lang " didn't like him at all " at Mentone, 
and Mr. Lang was one of those who loved him best in later 
years. Any student who has picked up carefully the trail 
of Stevenson must have met many other people whose first 
impression of him was unfavourable. The truth of the mat- 
ter seems to be this : Louis was so emphatically individual, 
so distinctly different from the ordinary run of people, that 
nobody who met him for the first time could dismiss him with 
indifference. It was necessary at once to like him or dislike 
him. But, charming as he was to those who recognized and 
knew him, he was by no means charming to everybody. 
The long hair, the black shirt, the velveteen jacket, the flow- 
ing cape, dissuaded many men [and one can hardly blame 
them] from seeing at once how real he was. 

And, now that we are glancing for the moment at the 
legendary Stevenson, another illusion may as well be punc- 



84 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

tured. This is the illusion that he understood children, and 
that children loved him at sight. As a matter of fact, Louis 
belonged to the considerable and not unworthy class of men 
who always feel uncomfortable in the presence of children 
who are very young. He didn't know what to do with them. 
He could write immortal poems in reminiscence of his own 
childhood ; but he couldn't make a baby smile. Small chil- 
dren didn't like him; because he seemed queer. 

The facts distilled into the foregoing paragraph were told 
to me by Mr. Edmund Gosse. As the father of three children 
who were in their infancy during the years when Stevenson 
was most frequently a visitor to his house, Mr. Gosse must 
be regarded as an authority on the subject of Stevenson's 
relations with the very young. On the other hand, I must 
hasten to add that both Mr. Lloyd Osbourne and Mr. Aus- 
tin Strong have assured me that Louis was the best of all 
playmates for boys in their teens. The truth of the matter 
seems to be this: boys he understood, but young children 
nearly always set him out of countenance. 

IV 

During the course of his second journey to Mentone, 
when Louis was "ordered south" in the autumn of 1873, he 
paused at Avignon; and this fact — for those who love him — 
increases the attraction of this famous town for travellers 
to-day. The very name of Avignon is like a chiming of 
sweet bells upon the ear; and the mediaeval city of the Popes 
is worthy of her name. 

From Avignon, Louis wrote to Mrs. Sitwell — the guar- 
dian of his growing years — "I have just read your letter upon 



FRANCE 85 

the top of the hill beside the church and the castle. The 
whole air was filled with sunset and the sound of bells; and 
I wish I could give you the least notion of the southernness 
and Provencality of all that I saw. ... I went away 
across the Rhone and up the hill on the other side that I 
might see the town from a distance. Avignon followed me 
with its bells and drums and bugles; for the old city has no 
equal for multitude of such noises. Crossing the bridge 
and seeing the brown turbid water foam and eddy about the 
piers, one could scarce believe one's eyes when one looked 
down upon the stream and saw the smooth blue mirroring 
tree and hill. . . . You cannot picture to yourself any- 
thing more steeped in hard bright sunshine than the view 
from the hill. The immovable inky shadow of the old bridge 
on the fleeting surface of the yellow river seemed more solid 
than the bridge itself. ... I turned back as I went 
away; the white Christ stood out in strong relief on His 
brown cross against the blue sky, and the four kneeling 
angels and lanterns grouped themselves about the foot with 
a symmetry that was almost laughable." 

This letter may seem of little interest to the majority of 
readers ; but it will mean much to that elected few who have 
been to Avignon, and have lingered, like Louis, on the sum- 
mit of the Rocher des Doms, to watch the sunset tinge with 
glory that broken bridge, whereon, to strains of music that 
are unforgettable, "Ton y danse, tout en rond." 

Nearly nineteen years later, when Stevenson was living 
in Samoa, he began a novel, called The Young Chevalier, of 
which the scenes were set in Avignon. He wrote only a 
chapter and a half of this projected work; but, the first 



86 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

chapter is sufficient to dispel the strange illusion that Louis 
knew nothing about women. The truth of this particular 
matter may be stated in a single sentence: he knew so 
much about women that he was afraid, until he was over 
forty, to let himself go upon the subject. But, from the 
point of view of the traveller on the trail of Stevenson, the 
chief interest of the fragment of The Young Chevalier is the 
evidence it gives of how strong a hold a town like Avignon 
could take upon the memory of such an artist. He had 
not visited the place for nearly twenty years when he began 
to write this story; yet he saw it still as clearly as if he had 
only gone "across the Rhone and up the hill on the other 
side that he might see the town from a distance." Any 
place which had, at any time, impressed him he could al- 
ways recall with ease. He forgot details; but details are of 
no importance to the artist. He remembered the essence 
and the sting. 

V 

It was on his return from Mentone in April, 1874, that 
Louis met his cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, in 
Paris, and really saw the city for the first time. Bob was a 
painter; and Louis was introduced at once to that Paris of 
the painters which is — ^f or youth, at least — the best of all the 
Parises there are. 

This Paris, which Louis learned to know and love, was not 
the Paris of the great boulevards, laid out (appropriately 
enough) by a baron whose un-Gallic name was Haussmann ; but 
the real Paris^ — the Paris of the rive gauche, the Paris of free- 
dom and adventure, the Paris where (in the immortal phrase 
of Dante) a youth may learn to "make himself eternal." 



FRANCE 87 

For many years thereafter, Stevenson became a fre- 
quently recurrent visitor to the Quartier Latin, This Paris 
[the best of all, as has been said] he knew much better and 
loved much more than any phase of London. He could 
wear his queer clothes, and think his queer thoughts, and feel 
his queer feelings, and pursue his queer business of learning 
how to write; and the fellows he encountered every day 
could understand him, and knew enough to leave him alone. 

His reminiscence of these apprentice years in Paris [his 
lehrjahre, to use Goethe's word] is chronicled in the early 
chapters of The Wrecker, wherein we may read of his enthu- 
siasm for the BouF Miche', and Roussillon wine, and the 
Luxembourg Gardens, and the Observatory, and Lavenue's, 
and the Rue de Rennes, and the shadowy Hotel de Cluny. 
Mr. Will H. Low, to whom this book was dedicated, has 
informed us that nearly all the incidents recorded in those 
scenes which are localized in the Latin Quarter were recalled 
from actual occurrences in Stevenson's Parisian days. 

His knowledge of the Paris of the painters was also utilized 
in the second story of the New Arabian Nights, wherein the 
inadvertent Silas Q. Scuddamore undergoes a series of hectic 
and troublesome adventures at the Bal Bullier. This dance- 
hall of the students of the Latin Quarter is described more 
clearly than any of the localities of London that are recorded 
in the same series of fantastic narratives. 

The opening of The Story of a Lie — which Stevenson 
wrote in the second cabin of the S.S. Devonia during the 
course of his first pilgrimage to America — is also set in 
modern Paris. Concerning this comparatively unnoted 
novelette, an' interesting anecdote was once told to me by 



88 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

Mrs. Salisbury Field [formerly Mrs. Isobel Strong] — the 
stepdaughter of R. L. S. and his amanuensis at Vailima. 
She told me that Stevenson had drawn the character of the 
disreputable "Admiral" from actual life; that he had in- 
vented a daughter for him for the purpose of the tale; that, 
several years later, he had discovered that the original of the 
despicable "Admiral" actually had a daughter, who was 
still living in the world; that, thereafter, Louis had lived 
in constant trembling lest this totally unknown young 
woman should read the book and recognize the portrait of 
her father; and that he had made a vow, in consequence, 
that he would never again permit himself to draw a tale 
from fact or make use of actual people in his fiction. 

But Stevenson was at home not merely in contemporary 
Paris; he was equally at home — in an imaginative sense — in 
the Paris of the Middle Ages. Any reader of his literary 
essays must remember that he was a great lover of Victor 
Hugo and Alexandre Dumas "pere, a great student of Fran- 
gois Villon and Charles of Orleans. His immediate knowl- 
edge of the Latin Quarter — the oldest quarter in Paris, by 
the way — supplemented by his reading of the writers of 
the past, and those other writers whose chief charm was their 
ability to recall and to revive the past, afforded him the 
material he needed for his tales of mediaeval France. 

Stevenson's interest in the history of Paris would be 
scarcely worth recording were it not for the fact [which has 
been already noted] that he never showed the slightest in- 
terest in the history of London. His London — so to speak — 
is devoid of any past; but his Paris stretches backward 
through the centuries. The first story that he ever pub- 




ANTWERP — THE START OF THE INLAND VOYAGE 



"An Inland Voyage is the record of a canoe 
trip on the rivers and canals between Antwerp 
and Pontoise that waSTifidertaken in the summer 
of 1876 in company with Sir Walter Simpson." — 
Page 95. 



4 



FRANCE 89 

lished was a tale of mediaeval Paris, A Lodging for the Night, 
In origin it was an offshoot from two of the critical papers 
which were later collected in Familiar Studies of Men and 
Books — the essay on Victor Hugo's Romances and the essay 
on Franqois Villon, In this great story Stevenson looked 
at Villon through the eyes of Victor Hugo. The tale is 
utterly original in style. A Paris of the past is recreated 
by a master hand. But A Lodging for the Night — despite 
its manifest, peculiar merits — may be regarded as the sort 
of story Hugo would have written if he, too, had made a 
thorough study of the life and work of the greatest vandal 
among poets, the greatest poet among vandals. 

Stevenson's second story, The Sire de Maletroifs Door^ 
is also set in mediaeval France. It is the sort of tale that 
old Dumas might have told if he had ever had sufficient 
leisure to develop the finished style of R. L. S. The story 
happens in a nameless town. We are informed that the 
hero, Denis de Beaulieu, is a resident of Bourges; and the 
scene of the tale may be imagined as a lesser Bourges, more 
dark and little and intimate and thrilling. There are 
glimpses of Gothic architecture in this story that show us 
that Stevenson had used his eyes to better advantage in 
France than he ever used them in England. In France, 
where his eyes were open, he could see the past; in England, 
where his eyes were shut, he could scarcely see the present. 

VI 

It was in April, 1875, that Bob Stevenson, who, being a 
painter, was already "a consistent Barbizonian," first intro- 
duced his cousin Louis to the delights of living in the out- 



90 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

skirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau. They made their 
headquarters at Siron's, in Barbizon, where they were known 
as ' * Stennis aine ' ' and * ' Stennis frere . ' ' Under these names, 
they step bodily into the pages of The Wrecker. The cousins 
play but minor parts in the tangled narrative of this amor- 
phous work of fiction; but the little that we see of them is 
drawn directly from life. 

In company with Sir Walter Simpson, Stevenson returned 
to Siron's in July of the same year. This time he remained 
for several weeks, devoting his ample leisure to the study of 
Charles of Orleans and Frangois Villon, and to the practice of 
the old French verse-forms^ — in one of which, the rondel,he at- 
tained a notable proficiency. From 1875 until he decamped 
to California on his great adventure, four years later, Louis 
never let a year go by without lingering for several weeks at 
Barbizon. Indeed, throughout this period, it would not be 
incorrect to consider as his home, or permanent address, the 
Forest of Fontainebleau. 

He was a great walker in these days, and explored not only 
the forest itself, but all the towns of the adjacent country- 
side. He knew not only Barbizon, but Marlotte, Montigny, 
and Chailly-en-Biere, Cernay la Ville, Bourron, Moret, 
Nemours, and Grez. The traveller who visits any of these 
entrancing little towns will find himself walking in the foot- 
steps of R. L. S. It is no longer necessary to describe them: 
they have been described for all time in the two essays in 
which Louis has recounted his memories of this district — the 
paper entitled Fontainebleau and the paper entitled Forest 
Notes. 

These towns, also, are made much of in those other works 



FRANCE 91 

of Stevenson's which are less frankly personal. The Envoy 
to Underwoods, for instance, which wishes to all 

A house with lawns enclosing it, 

A living river by the door, 

A nightingale in the sycamore, 

was inspired by the hospitable aspect of Mr. Will H. Low's 
little garden at Montigny-sur-Loing. The gayest of Steven- 
son's stories, Providence and the Guitar^ dances about the 
outskirts of the enchanted forest; and the most richly hu- 
morous of all his works of fiction, The Treasure of Franchard, 
leads us to the famous gorge that is hidden in the very heart 
of that alluring wilderness of trees. 

Both of these novelettes, of course, were written else- 
where; but their nimbleness of spirit affords us a reliable in- 
dex to Stevenson's state of mind in the brave days when he 
was twenty-five. His stepdaughter has told me that, years 
later in Samoa, he summed up his works of fiction in this 
phrase: *' Others touch the heart; I clutch at the throat." 
Indeed, there is discernible in nearly all his novels a certain 
ecstasy of grimness. "How about Providence and the Gui- 
tar?'' his amanuensis asked him. "True," he answered, 
"I was young once, and the world seemed gay." 

Next to Barbizon, where one could feel so free and happy 
at Siron's, Stevenson's favourite haunt in the entire district 
of Fontainebleau was Grez. He wrote to his mother in the 
summer of 1875: "I have been three days at a place called 
Grez, a pretty and very melancholy village on the plain. A 
low bridge, with many arches choked with sedge; green fields 
of white and yellow water-lilies; poplars and willows in- 



92 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

numerable; and about it all such an atmosphere of sadness 
and slackness, one could do nothing but get into the boat 
and out of it again, and yawn for bedtime." But later, in 
the essay entitled Fontainebleau, he wrote, in an antithetic 
mood: "But Grez is a merry place after its kind: pretty to 
see, merry to inhabit. The course of its pellucid river, 
whether up or down, is full of attractions for the navigator; 
the mirrored and inverted images of trees; lilies, and mills, 
and the foam and thunder of weirs. And of all noble sweeps 
of roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than the high- 
road to Nemours between its lines of talking poplar." 

Grez is notable, in Stevenson's work, as the home of Dr. 
Desprez in The Treasure of Franchard; but it is even more 
notable, in his life, as the place where, in the summer of 1876, 
he met the woman who was destined to become his wife. 
At the time of their meeting, Louis was only twenty -five and 
Mrs. Osbourne was thirty-seven. Despite this disparity in 
their ages, their affinity was instant, and their union was im- 
mediate and complete. Now that Mrs. Stevenson has 
passed away, it seems no longer necessary to suppress these 
simple facts, which explain the otherwise inexplicable oppo- 
sition that was made, at the time, by intimate friends like 
Sir Sidney Colvin and Mr. Edmund Gosse to Stevenson's 
entanglement with a married woman so much older than 
himself. Years later, Louis wrote, *' As I look back, I think 
my marriage was the best move I ever made in my life"; 
and nearly all his friends, when they came to know Fanny 
Stevenson, agreed with him. What seemed at the time to 
be the last, most tragic folly of his adolescence turned out in 
the end to be the making of the man. 



FRANCE 93 



VII 



There is another aspect of Stevenson's apprenticeship at 
Fontainebleau which has never been sufficiently emphasized. 
He was hving in a community of painters, not of writers. 
Thereby he became confirmed in the opinion that art should 
be regarded as a handicraft. Painters work with their hands ; 
and this is a fact that helps to keep them sane. Too many 
young writers merely dream about the things they mean to 
do, until they dream that they have done them; and there- 
after waste invaluable afternoons talking vaguely to admir- 
ing females, of both sexes, about their "mission" and their 
*' message." A painter's "mission" is to paint; his "mes- 
sage" is to cover canvas; and he hasn't any time to talk about 
himself before the sun goes down. A painter has to be a 
workman; and he has to learn that art is something to toil 
for and not to dream about. 

Stevenson was never one of those who hold the heresy that 
great writing will arise from "inspiration," and that any 
man, upon the impulse of the moment, will be able to say a 
thing well, provided only that he shall have something to say. 
He knew that the craft of writing must be learned by prac- 
tice, like the craft of painting. Nobody can play the violin 
unless he has learned to do so — ^not even if the man were 
Keats; and nobody can write unless he has written — and 
written, for the most part, badly — ^for a score of years. 
Literary style does not arise spontaneously from getting ex- 
cited or getting inspired or getting drunk; it arises from 
twenty years of unexcited, uninspired, unintoxicated study 
of rhythm and of literation. A man must learn to make a 



94 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

table or a shoe; a man must also learn to make a story or a 
poem or a play; and "genius" is merely a label for the apti- 
tude to learn. 

Louis, in his letters, speaks often of his "trade," his 
"craft," his "business," his "job"; he never speaks of his 
"genius" or his "inspiration," and he seldom speaks of his 
"art." He avoids, by wholesome instinct, those words 
which grease the lips of sentimental rhapsodists, but which 
would have excited ribald, roaring laughter from the painters 
who congregated at Siron's. It is the mark of a good work- 
man that he is not ashamed of work. If he brandishes the 
brush or plies the pen, he knows what he has done and why 
he did it; he never pretends that some angel from other- 
where took the implement out of his hand and did he knows 
not what. 

It is because Stevenson learned at Fontainebleau to ac- 
cept the attitude of the workman toward his work that his 
essay On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature is the 
only utterance upon this subject that is of any service to the 
student of the craftsmanship of writing. While other men 
have talked vaguely about style as a matter of genius or of 
inspiration, Louis talks about it soundly as a business of 
setting words together — a craft that may be taught by those 
who know, a craft that may be learned by those who are 
willing to work. "Lilies, and mills, and the foam and thun- 
der of weirs" — a man must have learned something about 
letters before he can write a phrase like that, even though, 
at the moment, he be excited about Grez, and be writing, 
at the moment, to his mother. And at Barbizon, where 
painters toiled all day to make little, negligible things called 




Vj»s!.TS.«l lAi\»V-, 



ON THE OISE BELOW LA FERE 



"Below La Fere the river runs through a piece 
of open pastoral country; green, opulent, loved 
by breeders; called the Golden Valley." 

— An Inland Voyage. — Page 95. 



FRANCE 95 

" studies," Louis imbibed the proper respect of a craftsman 

for his craft. 

VIII 

The first two books that Stevenson pubHshed deal with 
journey ings in France. An Inland Voyage is the record of a 
canoe trip on the rivers and canals between Antwerp and 
Pontoise that was undertaken in the summer of 1876 in com- 
pany with Sir Walter Simpson, who appears as the '* Ciga- 
rette" of the narrative; and Travels with a Donkey is the 
record of a tramp through the Cevennes undertaken in the 
autumn of 1878 in company with no one else than the im- 
mortal Modestine. It would be impertinent to append any 
details to Stevenson's own descriptions of the places visited; 
but something may be said, in general, about his methods of 
observation on journeys such as these. 

In the first place, it should be noted that Stevenson loved 
travel for the sake of travel. He enjoyed the sense of mov- 
ing on, quite irrespective of the goal he might be moving 
toward. In practice, as in preaching, he approved the 
maxim that "to travel hopefully is a better thing than to 
arrive." He liked to travel in France as he liked to travel 
in no other country; but, because of this fact, and not in spite 
of it, he never visited Rouen nor Amiens nor Rheims nor Car- 
cassonne — those "show-places" of the tourist that lay, at 
one time or another, only a little distant from his path. 
Even in the towns he visited, he frequently neglected to see 
the buildings that are starred in Baedeker, because he was 
so busy enjoying the casual adventures of the by-ways. 

When Louis took a trip in search of "copy," the one thing 
he was careful to observe was himself. His method of de- 



96 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

scrip tion is entirely subjective. He does not so much de- 
scribe Noyon or Compiegne as record what happened to the 
impressionable temperament of R. L. S. in the one place and 
the other. To go deliberately to Rheims for the purpose of 
describing what, in his departed century, was the most ex- 
quisite efflorescence of mediaeval architecture would have 
required objectivity of observation; he preferred to record 
his own emotions in a comparatively inconsiderable city 
like Maubeuge. In other words, he travelled not so much 
to see this place or that, as merely to transfer himself from 
one place to another and to feel his mental pulse in pass- 
ing. 

Even in the Cevennes, he made his book out of himself 
instead of out of the country that a less inspired traveller 
would have explored more thoroughly. In the twelve days 
of his transit, he followed merely the most convenient roads, 
and missed without regret many of the details of the dis- 
trict that are most noted for their beauty. He could make 
a Rembrandt picture out of the shining of his midnight 
cigarette upon his silver ring; and a writer who can do that 
does not need to delve for inspiration into the gorges of the 
Tarn. 

The Trappist Monastery of Notre Dame des Neiges, 
where Louis lodged for two days — September 26th and 27th, 
1878 — is described at length in the third section of Travels 
with a Donkey. It was here that he derived the inspiration 
for one of his most important poems — number XXIII of 
Underwoods^ entitled Our Lady of the Snows — in which he 
attacks the monastic theory of life because of its negation 
of all positive morality. This monastery was almost com- 



FRANCE 97 

pletely destroyed by fire in the early summer of 1912. By 
this misfortune the most interesting memento of Stevenson's 
transit through the Upper Gevaudan was deleted from the 
contemplation of future pilgrims on his trail. 

Before setting out on his tramping trip with the uncom- 
plaining Modestine, Stevenson spent a month at Le Mon- 
astier^ — during which, according to his custom of describing 
places at a distance, he wrote the major part of his little 
book on Edinburgh. This sojourn at Le Monastier is com- 
memorated in the unfinished essay entitled A Mountain 
Town in France, which, originally projected as a prologue to 
Travels with a Donkey, was never published till after his 
death. When this paper first appeared, in the winter num- 
ber of The Studio for 1896, it was accompanied by several 
sketches which Stevenson had made of the town itself and 
the surrounding country. These pencil drawings, though 
obviously the work of one who was little practised in the 
graphic art, have been praised by no less an authority than 
Mr. Joseph Pennell for their accuracy of observation and 
their essential truth to nature. 

IX 

In the autumn of 1882, after Stevenson was married, he 
sought a settled residence in the south of France. In Sep- 
tember he visited Montpellier, in company with his cousin 
Bob. In October he was met at Marseilles by his wife; and 
the couple installed themselves in a house and garden called 
the "Campagne Defli," in the suburb of St. Marcel, seated 
within sight of that storied harbour in which the Chateau 
d'lf of Monte Cristo seems to float at anchor. But after 



98 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

two months an outbreak of fever drove the Stevensons to 
Nice, whence, in February, 1883, they proceeded to Hyeres. 

After a brief residence at the Hotel des lies d'Or, they 
installed themselves in a chalet at Hyeres, which was called 
"La Solitude." Here they Hved from March, 1883, to 
July, 1884; but an epidemic of cholera which broke out in 
the summer of 1884 drove the Stevensons to seek another 
residence and resulted in their exodus to Bournemouth. 

Comparatively little has been written of the period of 
Stevenson's residence at Hyeres; but this period is often 
mentioned in his later letters as the happiest of his life. 
"I was only happy once; that was at Hyeres," he wrote to 
Sir Sidney Colvin from Vailima; and the name of the place 
rings out with a sudden, unexpected poignancy. It was of 
the chalet "La Solitude" that he wrote, in the seventh 
poem of Underwoods — 

Friend, in my mountain-side demesne. 
My plain-beholding, rosy, green. 
And linnet-haunted garden-ground, 
Let still the esculents abound — 

and he rarely wrote poems except when he was personally 
moved. From "La Solitude" he wrote to Mr. Low, in 
October, 1883 : "I live in a most sweet comer of the universe, 
sea and fine hills before me, and a rich variegated plain; and 
at my back a craggy hill, loaded with vast feudal ruins. 
I am very quiet; a person passing by my door half startles 
me; but I enjoy the most aromatic airs, and at night the 
most wonderful view into a moonlit garden. By day this 
garden fades into nothing, overpowered by its surroundings 




SAINT JACQUES — COMPIEGNE 



"Stevenson's method of description is en- 
tirely subjective. He does not so much describe 
Noyon or Compiegne as record what happened 
to the impressionable temperament of R. L. S. io 
the one place and the other." — Pa^e 96. 



FRANCE 99 

and the luminous distance; but at night and when the moon 
is out, that garden, the arbour, the flight of stairs that mount 
the artificial hillock, the plumed blue gum-trees that hang 
trembling, become the very skirts of Paradise. Angels, I 
know, frequent it; and it thrills all night with the flutes of 
silence." 

Louis did comparatively little writing at Hyeres. He 
was well and happy at "La Solitude"; and the fact has been 
already noted that he worked most and worked best when 
he was ill and kept in bed. He finished Prince Otto and The 
Silverado Squatters, he toiled at The Black Arrow, and he 
wrote many of the poems that were subsequently gathered 
into the Child's Garden of Verses. But though his formal 
labours at this period were comparatively insignificant, his 
casual and unpremeditated letters were the brightest and 
best of his career. He was thoroughly alive at this time, 
and his essential liveliness is nowhere else so well expressed 
as in his correspondence. 



It was in August, 1886, that Stevenson made his last pil- 
grimage to France. He proceeded to Paris, with Mrs. Steven- 
son and Henley, to visit Mr. and Mrs. Will H. Low, who 
were established at that time in the Rue Vernier. Henley 
introduced him to Rodin; and his final memory of the mother- 
country of the arts was his memory of the Michel- Angelo of 
modern times. 

When Louis returned to London in October of that year, 
he little realized that he had left for the last time the freest 
and most hospitable country he had ever known. Other- 



100 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

wise we may be sure that, in the heart of so loyal a Scot, 
there would have sounded some echo of that song which the 
poet has ascribed to Mary Stuart: 

O, ma patrie. 

La plus cherie. 

Adieu, plaisant pays de France! 



Chapter Five 
THE REST OF EUROPE 



CHAPTER FIVE 
THE REST OF EUROPE 



Outside of France, Stevenson's acquaintance with the con- 
tinent of Europe was singularly limited. His failure to 
familiarize himself with many of the cities that are known to 
nearly every traveller arose not from any lack of oppor- 
tunity, but merely from a lack of inclination. He had a 
gypsy love of journeying, but he devoted little forethought 
to his journey's end. In his attitude toward travel, as in his 
attitude toward college education, he might be "pointed out 
for the pattern of an idler." He would never go deliberately 
to any place for the sake of seeing any particular thing, how- 
ever famous it might be. Travel of that sort would smack 
of system, and he preferred a drifting truancy. He was a 
fortnight at Frankfort-on-the-Main, but he never went to 
Heidelberg to see the castle. He spent some time at Mont- 
pellier; but he never went to Nimes to see the temple, nor to 
Carcassonne to see what might have served as the setting of 
such a mediaeval story as The Sire de Maletroifs Door, One 
cannot imagine Louis going all the way to Castelfranco to see 
that single picture that some of us have seen — a picture so 
consummate that it makes blood-brothers ever afterward of 
all the men of all the nations who have made that sacred 
pilgrimage; and if ever any accident of destiny had tossed 

103 



104 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

Stevenson ashore at Patras, it may be assumed as certain 
that he would not have bothered to complete the journey to 
Olympia, even to see the Hermes of Praxiteles. He was not 
that sort of traveller. "The most beautiful adventures," 
he has told us, "are not those we go to seek"; and though 
Louis would never have gone to Olympia, he would have 
enjoyed adventures at every street-corner of Patras — a 
town in which, according to systematic travellers, there is 
nothing to demand attention. 

Thus, in analyzing Stevenson's entire experience of travel, 
we are confronted by the paradox that he saw most where 
there was least to see. He has given us an essay on Mon- 
terey, but he has given us no essay on Antwerp. What ap- 
pealed to him in travel was, first of all, himself, and, secondly, 
the casual people with whom he scraped acquaintance on a 
journey. Third and lastly [as Touchstone might have said], 
he had an eye for scenery; but he took no interest in what 
appeals to the majority of travellers. He would scarcely 
cross the street to see a famous building or a famous statue 
or a famous picture; he would never deliberately plan a trip 
to take him to a series of famous cities. Instead, he made it 
his boast that he could always be happy waiting at a railway 
junction, because he " would have some scattering thoughts," 
he "could count some grains of memory," compared to 
which the whole of many romances seemed but dross. 

We may envy Stevenson that inspired self-suJ0Sciency that 
enabled him, at any time and in any place, to batter himself 
into an adventure [and this rather violent phrase is one that 
he himself applied to Robert Burns]; but we cannot envy 
him that almost obstinate truancy which robbed him of a 



'■-^^^E' 



^ 




A ROAD IN THE CEVENNES 



" Travels with a Donkey is the record of a tramp 
through the Cevennes undertaken in the autumn 
of 1878 in company with no one else than the 
immortal Modestine. In the twelve days of his 
transit Stevenson followed merely the most con- 
venient roads, and missed without regret many 
of the details of the district that are most noted 
for their beauty." — Page 96. 



THE REST OF EUROPE 105 

sight of many of the wonders of the world. Travel, after all, 
must be considered as a serious engagement if it is to be 
made conducive to the culture of a man. If a person ca- 
pable of culture finds himself shipwrecked at the Piraeus, he 
owes it as a duty to his destiny to leap into a cab and drive 
to the Acropolis. The point that joyous accidents might 
happen to him at the harbour-side does not obliterate the 
more important point that still more wonderful adventures 
might happen to him as he sat before the Parthenon. 

But Stevenson, who cared so very much for letters and so 
very much for his own adventurous and stinging experience 
of life, cared very little for architecture or painting or sculp- 
ture, or for the glamour that tradition gathers around places 
that are memorable for a noble past. A cultured person is 
prepared to appreciate with equal keenness a worthy work 
of any of the arts; but, by this definition, Stevenson was 
never a cultured person. He could appreciate only what 
happened to himself; and great buildings, great pictures, 
great statues, seldom [in any real sense] happened to him. 
Though widely read in literature, Louis knew little of the 
other arts — ^far less than he might have learned if he had 
opened his eyes to the many opportunities for education 
that were offered in the course of his repeated pilgrimages. 
At Barbizon and Paris he lived in the company of painters; 
yet never, even in his letters, does he show that he had 
studied the masterpieces in the Louvre. When he wrote his 
thrice-rejected essay on Some Portraits by Raeburn — the only 
work in which he touches on the art of painting — he was 
more interested in the personalities of the sitters than in the 
art by which their living lineaments had been made immortal. 



106 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

Except for the eloquent rhapsody on the Elgin marbles that 
was written in a personal letter to Mrs. Sitwell, he never 
revealed in any of his writings an interest in the art of sculp- 
ture. He played at composing music, just as he had played 
at drawing landscapes at Le Monastier; but he never devel- 
oped any culture in the art. To architecture he seems to 
have remained almost entirely insensible: otherwise he 
would have recorded in his letters some impressions of the 
greatest buildings he had seen. Concerning art in the ab- 
stract he was an eager theorist; but he was strangely lacking 
in appreciation of art in the concrete, except, of course, with- 
in the precincts of that special art of letters which enchanted 
him into a special sort of scholarship. Outside his own field 
Stevenson was not, like Hawthorne, afflicted with bad taste 
— the sort of taste chat led the author of The Scarlet Letter 
to regard W. W. Story as a great sculptor: it is nearer to the 
truth to say that he had no taste at all. He would rather 
spend an hour talking amiably with a cab-driver than spend 
an hour in silent converse with the Venus of Melos. The 
first experience offered, to his thinking, an adventure; the 
second was merely an incident that might occur to anybody. 
Thus, for his great gift of attracting to himself adventures 
that pass other people by, he paid the penalty of indifference 
toward many great things that other people see. 

II 

ITALY 

Few people, even among those who call themselves Steven- 
sonians, are aware that R. L. S. was ever in Italy. In March, 
1863, when Louis was twelve years old, his parents took 



THE REST OF EUROPE 107 

him from Mentone on a tour through Genoa, Naples, Rome, 
Florence, and Venice; and it was not until the end of May 
that the family returned northward, by way of the Tyrol and 
the Rhine. This trip, however, made no impression on his 
mind; and in later years the very fact that he had taken it 
seems almost to have faded from his memory. He was 
never heard to speak of Italy by any of his friends ; and no- 
where in his works, not even in his letters, does he ever men- 
tion any of the great Italian cities as a place that he himself 
had seen. 

The author of Life on the Lagoons^ Horatio F. Brown, who 
was a friend of John Addington Symonds, became intimate 
with Stevenson at Davos in 1881. The intimacy is attested 
by the fact that Louis gave to Brown his favourite copy of 
the Fruits of Solitude of William Penn. After returning to 
Venice, Brown sent to Louis some translations from old 
Venetian boat songs; and the gift was acknowledged with 
the poem beginning. 

Brave lads in olden musical centuries 
Sang, night by night, adorable choruses, 
Sat late by alehouse doors in April 
Chaunting in joy as the moon was rising, 

which, next to Tennyson's address to Milton, is the most 
successful experiment in the difficult Alcaic measure extant 
in the English language. Throughout this intimacy, how- 
ever, though Brown often talked of Venice for hours at a 
time, he never discovered that Stevenson had been there. 
Mr. Lloyd Osbourne has recorded that he never heard his 
stepfather refer to the Italian tour except on one occasion. 



108 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

*'when he recalled with delight the picturesque appearance 
of their military escort in horsemen's cloaks riding through 
the Papal States." 

That a boy of twelve should spend nearly three months in 
Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice, and should afterwards 
remember nothing but a single incident in the transit of the 
road, appears indeed incredible; yet why, if he remembered 
Venice, should he have neglected to reveal the fact to Brown? 
At so early an age, one would not expect a studious apprecia- 
tion of architecture or of painting or of sculpture; but one 
would expect, at least, that the strangeness of a city where 
the streets are water would register an indelible impression 
on the mind. And to see Florence at twelve and then forget 
it seems a little like a sin that needs to be forgiven. 

Yet this lack of interest in great and famous cities re- 
mained, as we have seen, habitual with Stevenson in later life. 
At no time would he have felt a sympathetic thrill at hearing 
the Italian proverb, "See Naples, and die." He would al- 
ways have been interested more in " horsemen's cloaks " and 
in "the picturesque appearance of a military escort" along an 
open road. 

For effects of landscape, on the other hand, he had an 
open and an eager eye at the early age of twelve. It has 
been already noted that he developed an enthusiasm for the 
valley of the Rhone on the journey southward to Mentone, 
and that he was able to recall the topography of that Riviera 
town itself with a singular particularity after an interval of 
ten years. On the return from Italy in 1863, Louis was 
driven through the Brenner Pass and subsequently saw the 
Murgthal in Baden. So vivid was his recollection of these 



h 



I 



THE REST OF EUROPE 109 

mountain regions that, though he never visited either the 

Murgthal or the Brenner Pass again, he was able to combine 

his impressions of the two in the landscape setting of Will o' 

the Mill, which was written in Edinburgh, fourteen years 

later, in August, 1877. The characters in this story are 

clearly English; but no such landscape exists in England, or 

in Scotland, either. It is not surprising that the German 

Alps should have taken such strong hold upon the memory 

of an eager and impressionable boy; but the astounding and 

scarcely explicable fact remains that he was unable, at the 

same period of his career, to receive an abiding impression 

of the view of Buonarotti's dome from the Pincio at sunset 

or the massive majesty of the Coliseum underneath the 

moon. 

Ill 

SPAIN 

Stevenson never crossed the Pyrenees; but one of his most 
elaborate short-stories was required, by a psychological neces- 
sity, to be set in Spain. Olalla was written at Bournemouth 
in 1885. Many critics have singled out this story as an 
instance in which, contrary to his custom, Louis described a 
landscape he had never seen; but this statement is not en- 
tirely in accordance with the facts. He derived the setting 
from his memories of Spanish California. It is for this rea- 
son, doubtless, that he makes the vegetation too luxuriant 
and fills the mountain gorges with abundant waterfalls. 
Those of us who are familiar with Spain will remember the 
aspect of aridity as the most insistent feature of the Spanish 
landscape. In such typical prospects as the view from the 
Escorial or the view from the Paseo del Rastro in Avila, the 



110 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

observer gazes over barren sun-baked plains to an unnatu- 
rally far horizon. The Guadarrama Mountains, in which 
the story of Olalla seems imagined to occur, since the name- 
less city mentioned at the outset of the narrative can be no 
other than Madrid, are more dusty, more scraggy, more 
stunted and desolate in vegetation, than the California land- 
scape from which Stevenson received his hints; and, even in 
the spring season, there is only an inconsiderable gush of 
water down the rocks. 

The architecture of the residencia is suflSciently correct, 
except for one detail. The hero's room is ''lined with some 
lustrous wood disposed in panels. ' ' I have never seen a room 
in any ancient Spanish mansion lined with wood. The sort 
of room that Louis had in mind would, in actuality, be lined 
with the kind of coloured tiling that is called in Spanish azulejo. 

But what may be termed the psychological atmosphere of 
Olalla is absolutely Spanish; and Stevenson learned more of 
Spain by lying in bed in Bournemouth and imagining what 
it must be like than he learned of Italy by being taken from 
one end of the country to the other at the age of twelve. 
The slow decay of the entire Spanish nation seems symbol- 
ized by the tragical disintegration of Olalla' s family; and the 
sedentary, smiling, and weak-witted mother is characteristic 
of fully half the women that one sees in Spain to-day. 

IV 

GERMANY 

Stevenson's experience of Germany was confined almost 
entirely to the summer of 1872. At that time Louis was 
supposed to be studying law; and there had been some talk 






^Kw^^<^ 






.\ 













ALONG THE WATER FRONT — MARSEILLES 



"In October, 1882, Stevenson was met at Mar- 
seilles by his wife; and the couple installed 
themselves in a house and garden called the 
'Campagne Defli,' in the suburb of St. Marcel, 
seated within sight of that storied harbour in 
which the Chateau d'lf of Monte Cristo seems 
to float at anchor." — Page 97. 



THE REST OF EUROPE 111 

of his taking a summer session at a German university, in 
company with Sir Walter Simpson. A project so appaUing 
to the apologist for idlers was of course rejected; but the two 
friends, having abandoned the purpose of the journey, saw 
no reason to abandon the journey itself, and they proceeded 
to Germany in July. Late in August Stevenson's parents 
joined him at Baden-Baden; and he then went for a short 
walking tour in the Black Forest, which afforded him several 
landscape impressions that later became useful in Prince Otto, 

The Arethusa and the Cigarette — as they subsequently 
came to call themselves — ^proceeded to Germany by way of 
Brussels. From this delightful little minor Paris, Louis 
wrote to his mother on July 25th. According to his habit, 
he said no word of Rubens or the Palais de Justice or the 
church of Ste. Gudule; but he wrote a charming description 
of the nocturnal aspect of the Pare, and appended a vivid 
picture of a boy at his hotel who went about with a live snake 
in his pocket. 

The two adventurers settled down at Frankfort-on-the- 
Main, and endeavoured, in a desultory fashion, to soak in the 
German language. Why they should have picked out 
Frankfort in preference to Dresden or Munich or Berlin re- 
mains a mystery. Frankfort is merely a commercial city, 
with no picturesque details except a second-rate cathedral 
and a rather charming group of old houses called the Romer; 
and even the German Baedeker advises the tourist to dismiss 
it with a single day. 

It is not surprising that, at Frankfort, Louis should have 
gathered the impression that Germany was less civilized than 
Belgium. He wrote to his mother, on July 29th : " I had a swim 



112 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

in the Main, and then bread and cheese and Bavarian beer in a 
sort of cafe, or at least the German substitute for a cafe ; but 
what a falHng off after the heavenly forenoons in Brussels!" 

His method of studying the German language was to pro- 
vide himself with a copy of the Lieder und Balladen von 
Robert Burns, "translated by one Silbergleit," and to regale 
the company at little rural taverns by reciting such verses as 
" Mein Herz ist im Hochland, mein Herz ist nicht hier.'' Also 
he allowed the natives to ask him questions about Scotland. 
He went often to the opera; but he could not follow the lan- 
guage sufficiently to understand a play. 

The two friends lived first at the Hotel Landsberg, and 
later moved into lodgings at No. 13 Rosengasse. This 
address was distant only a single block from the house, at 
No. 23 Grosse Hirschgraben, where Goethe was born, on 
August 28th, 1749, and spent his boyhood. Apart from its 
association with the greatest modern poet, the Goethe-Haus 
is well worth visiting for its architectural dignity and at- 
mosphere of age; yet it may be doubted if Louis ever went 
to see it. It is never mentioned in his letters from the Rosen- 
gasse. Instead, we find descriptive passages like this : " There 
is here such a twittering of canaries (I can see twelve out 
of our window), and such continual visitation of gray doves 
and big-nosed sparrows, as make our little bye-street into a 
perfect aviary." No other visitor to Frankfort would have 
counted those twelve canaries ; and no other would have re- 
mained indifferent to Goethe's house around the corner. 
Here we have in a nutshell the definitive feature of Steven- 
son's attitude of mind toward travel. 

The German language did not come easily to Louis, nor 



THE REST OF EUROPE 113 

did he develop any lasting interest in German literature. 
For a year or two after his stay in Frankfort he occasionally 
drifted into German phrases in his letters; but, considering 
his experience as a whole, it may be said that Germany 
meant next to nothing to him. Nobody who loved France 
so whole-heartedly as Louis could ever feel entirely at home 
beyond the Rhine. 

He made no use of Germany in his works except for the 
landscape background of Prince Otto. This book was begun 
in California and finished at Hyeres ; but not only the nomen- 
clature of the characters but the entire aspect of the country- 
side is German. Any travelled person, if asked to locate the 
imaginary state of Griinewald, would set it either in the 
Black Forest or in the mountains of Bavaria. Many of 
Stevenson's most elaborate effects of landscape are developed 
in this story; and it is therefore interesting to record that he 
had seen very little of the district from which he took the 
scenery. A day or two in Bavaria and a week or two in 
Baden afforded him a fund of memories on which he could 
draw a decade later in distant California; but of German 
cities, German art, and that methodical devotion to a regular 
routine that the Germans call life, he received no impressions 
that, in after years, seemed worth recalling. 

V 

SWITZERLAND 

Every landscape painter knows that great mountains are 
less amenable to the uses of art than more homely and habita- 
ble hills, just as [in the technical sense of the word] the falls 
of Niagara are less " picturesque " than the falls of some com- 



114 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

paratively little river like the Clyde. This may be the 
reason why Stevenson was more interested in the look of vil- 
lages than in the look of cities ; and it is certainly the reason 
why he set Prince Otto in Southern Germany instead of 
Switzerland^ — a country that was better known to him. 

Stevenson spent two winters in Switzerland; but his feeling 
for the high Alps was conditioned by the fact that he did not 
go there as a tourist but was sent there as an invalid. In the 
autumn of 1880 [the first year of his married life] he was or- 
dered by his physicians to try the clear cold climate of the 
Alps; and he selected Davos Platz as a place of residence, 
mainly because another famous literary invalid was already 
installed there. This was John Addington Symonds — the 
"Opalstein" of Talk and Talkers, 

Stevenson arrived at Davos Platz, with his wife and step- 
son, on November 4th, and remained there, at the Hotel 
Belvedere, until the following April. The conditions of his 
life in this Alpine resort were vividly described in a series of 
four papers sent home to the Pall Mall Gazette. Health and 
Mountains appeared on February 17th, 1881, and was fol- 
lowed by Davos in Winter on February 21st, Alpine Diversions 
on February 26th, and The Stimulation of the Alps on March 
5th. These interesting papers stand, in two ways, unique 
among his writings. In the first place, they violate his life- 
long habit of never describing a place till after he had left it; 
and, in the second place, they are the only essays, with the 
single exception of Ordered South, in which he appears before 
the public frankly as an invalid. 

Stevenson did scarcely any other work that winter, except 
to see Virginibus Puerisque through the press. It was a 



THE REST OF EUROPE 115 

passive period in his existence, during which he was con- 
tented to sit around and watch himself grow well. Mrs. 
Sitwell came out in the early spring, to watch beside the 
deathbed of her young son, who succumbed to consumption 
in the month of April. This sad event was the occasion of 
Stevenson's greatest poem — to me, at least, it has always 
seemed the greatest — the poem entitled In Memoriam 
F, A. S., which ends with the stanza: 

All that life contains of torture, toil, and treason, 
Shame, dishonour, death, to him were but a name. 

Here, a boy, he dwelt through all the singing season 
And ere the day of sorrow departed as he came. 

The next year, 1881, the Stevensons returned to Davos 
Platz on October 18th and remained once more till April. 
This season they installed themselves in a house of their 
own, the Chalet am Stein, a dependency of the Hotel Buol, 
seated on a hillside above the English chapel. Here Louis 
completed Treasure Island, which had been begun at Brae- 
mar — writing the last fourteen chapters in a fortnight of 
" delighted industry." Before leaving Davos finally, he also 
wrote nearly all of The Silverado Squatters, and several essays, 
including Talks and Talkers [suggested by his daily chats 
with Symonds] and A Gossip on Romance, This second sea- 
son in Switzerland, it will be noted, was much more fruitful 
than the first; but Louis always fretted against the regulated 
life of an invalid resort, and he was delighted when his physi- 
cians permitted him, when the next winter rolled around, to 
forsake the high Alps and return to the Riviera. 

There was so little to do at Davos that Stevenson passed a 



116 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

great deal of his time in play with his stepson, Mr. Lloyd 
Osbourne — who, at that period, was only thirteen years of 
age. It was at Davos that these two playmates developed 
the elaborate war game which Mr. Osbourne has so charm- 
ingly described. The second season in Switzerland was also 
the occasion of the publications of the Davos Press. Mr. 
Osbourne had a toy printing-press, on which he set up a 
boyish composition of his own entitled, Black Canyon, or 
Wild Adventures in the Far West: A Tale of Instruction and 
Amusement for the Young. His stepfather caught the infec- 
tion, and composed several playful poems for publication by 
"S. L. Osbourne and Company." These he illustrated with 
wood-cuts, having spontaneously discovered the art of wood- 
engraving by experimenting with chance pieces of soft wood, 
cut apparently from packing-cases. 

Both texts and illustrations of the publications of the 
Davos Press are known to Stevenson collectors. It seems to 
me that both have been a little overpraised. Many of the 
poems are lacking in point; and the cuts, though spirited in 
action and executed with evident delight, are a little too 
crude to be entirely amusing. They cannot hold a candle, 
for example, to Mr. Kipling's joyous illustrations to the 
Just-So Stories. Neither man was trained to be a graphic 
artist; but Mr. Kipling's work, for all its faults, is art, and 
Stevenson's is not. 

VI 

HOLLAND 

In a literal sense, Holland is the easiest country in the 
world to see. I distinctly remember that, once, when I was 




HOTEL DES ILES D'OR — HYERES 



^ "After a brief residence at the Hotel des 
lies d'Or, they installed themselves in a chalet 
at Hyeres, which was called 'La Solitude.' 
. . . Comparatively little has been written 
of the period of Stevenson's residence at Hyeres; 
but this period is often mentioned in his later 
letters as the happiest of his life." — Page 98. 



THE REST OF EUROPE 117 

travelling through the Netherlands on a canal-boat, I saw 
at the same time, from my perch on the poop-deck, a distant 
prospect of three great cities^ — Ley den and Haarlem and Am- 
sterdam. The country, as everybody knows, is absolutely 
flat; and the view in all directions is interrupted only by 
windmills, scattered hamlets, and the long lines of trees that 
hedge the waterways. The look of Holland [as the French 
would say] can be gathered at a single "stroke of the eye." 

It takes time, however, to study the art treasures of the 
country. With these treasures, Stevenson was not familiar. 
His knowledge of Holland was restricted to that single glance 
which has already been defined. 

It was not because he cared especially for Holland that 
Stevenson, writing in far-away Vailima, set the final section 
of Catriona in that country. It was necessary, for the pur- 
pose of his narrative, that David and Catriona should jour- 
ney alone together through some foreign country close to 
Scotland — some country, moreover, through which a young 
girl could travel afoot without difficulty. Holland filled the 
bill, in both of these regards; and, furthermore, it was a 
country that Louis could well enough describe in Samoa 
without having any special knowledge of it. 

As the two young lovers land at Helvoetsluys, the hero — 
who tells the story — says, "I had my first look of Holland — 
a line of windmills birling in the breeze." This description 
is interesting in two ways: it is so orthodox in content, and 
such a little masterpiece of literation. David and Catriona 
proceed "in four hours of travel to the great city of Rotter- 
dam." This great city is described in a single paragraph; 
and all that is precisely noted in this passage is that the 



118 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

streets were ''pretty brightly lighted and thronged with 
wild-like, outlandish characters." This description would 
apply to many other harbour towns — Marseilles for instance; 
but the local look of Rotterdam is totally different from the 
local look of Marseilles. 

The hero and the heroine proceed afoot from Rotterdam 
to Leyden, through Delft and The Hague. I have followed 
the same route on a bicycle, and know the country well. 
Delft is described by David Balfour in the following phrases : 
''The red gabled houses made a handsome show on either 
hand of the canal; the servant lassies were out slestering and 
scrubbing at the very stones upon the public highway": and 
that is all. These details are true; they are, indeed, the two 
details most necessary to enumerate; but any one who loves 
the quaintest of Dutch cities must wonder why David Bal- 
four saw no more of Delft on his pedestrian excursion. 

The Hague is dismissed in a single word, without descrip- 
tion; and the lovers finally arrive at Leyden — a place de- 
termined by the law studies of the hero. Fifty pages are 
devoted to their life in Leyden : every day they go forth for a 
walk about the town: yet no single feature of this very in- 
teresting city is described, and, for all the reader is privileged 
to see, the scene might just as well be set in any other coun- 
try. To sum the matter up — ^though over a hundred pages 
of Catriona are set in Holland, the sentences devoted to 
description of the special aspects of that unique and fascinat- 
ing country might all be printed on a single page. The nar- 
rative concerns itself almost entirely with a strictly personal 
analysis of the emotions of the hero and the heroine in their 
temerariously virginal relation to each other; and, dealing 



THE REST OF EUROPE 119 

with a dramatic foreground so tremulous and thrilling, the 

novelist did not concern himself with the less provocative 

details of that descriptive background which stood ready to 

his hand. 

VII 

Stevenson's handling of Holland in Catriona is so charac- 
teristic of his treatment of the element of setting in many of 
his other works of fiction that it demands particular atten- 
tion. The critical conclusions of the present writer on this 
subject may best be expressed by summarizing a conversa- 
tion with Mr. Henry James concerning the Dutch scenes in 
the novel now before us. 

From Vailima, in December, 1893 — a year before his 
death — Stevenson wrote to Mr. James as follows: "Your 
jubilation over Catriona did me good, and still more the subt- 
lety and truth of your remark on starving the visual sense 
in that book. ... I hear people talking, and Ifeel them 
acting, and that seems to me to be fiction. My two aims 
may be described as — 1st, War to the adjective, 2d, Death 
to the optic nerve." 

This passage had always a little mystified me. "Death 
to the optic nerve" seemed so baseless an ejaculation from 
an author who, in the very book in question, had written such 
sentences as this: "She sat on the floor by the side of my 
great mail, and the chimney lighted her up, and shone and 
blinked upon her, and made her glow and darken through 
a wonder of fine hues!" If this were not a visual effect, 
what was ? And then there thronged into my mind a myriad 
remembered postures of characters arrested in some pose 
made ready for the illustrator. All his life, it seemed, Louis 



no ON TH£ TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

had been twanging at the optic nerve. What was meant, 
then, by the phrasing of this "great refusal"? Thereupon, 
remembering that, in his letters, Stevenson — chameleon-like 
— took colour from the person he was writing to, I deter- 
mined to ask Mr. James to elucidate this statement. 

I cannot attempt to print a verbal record of Mr. James's 
answer to this question; for such a record would read too like 
a parody of this great writer's later style. A witty lady once 
remarked that Mr. James conversed as if he were reading 
proofs. The fact is that the puzzling and fascinating style 
of his latest literary period is merely a literal recording of the 
manner of his conversation. I have never listened, with 
such rapt attention, to so entrancing a talker. A sentence, 
with Mr. James, is never the expression of a completed 
thought: it is always an adventure into the illimitable do- 
main of thinking — interrupted by numberless parentheses 
incorporating unexpected particularizations — and yet won- 
derfully winning its way at last to a rounded and completed 
close. 

I cannot record the manner of Mr. James's utterance; nor 
would I imitate it if I could. What he told me, in effect, was 
this : He had remonstrated with Stevenson, because, writing 
an historical novel dated in the middle of the eighteenth 
century, Louis had devoted more than a hundred pages to 
adventures set in Holland without affording the reader any 
adequate picture of that very interesting country in that 
very interesting time. Mr. James had considered that the 
business of the historical novelist was to grant the reader 
opportunities to live in other times and lands : here was an 
opportunity, and Stevenson had passed it by. The figures 



THE REST OF EUROPE 121 

in the foreground were thoroughly imagined; but the back- 
ground had no real existence. The same adventures of the 
spirit might have taken place in Rye or in Albany at the 
present day. 

This recollection of Mr. James's unpublished letter to 
Stevenson enabled me at last to understand Stevenson's 
reply to it. In saying, "Death to the optic nerve," Louis 
meant merely, "Death to setting, when I find myself con- 
cerned primarily with character in action." What was the 
use of describing either Delft or Ley den in detail — what was 
the use of recalling descriptively the aspect of the eighteenth 
century — when what concerned the novelist primarily was 
merely the emotions of a virgin man and the emotions of a 
virgin woman thrust by chance into an exquisite and perilous 
propinquity? 

This suggestive conversation with Mr. James led me to 
review Stevenson's attitude toward the element of setting in 
all his works of fiction. Did Louis habitually "starve the 
visual sense," I asked myself, or did he blur his background 
only when it was artistically necessary to focus attention on 
the figures in the foreground? I soon determined that the 
latter was the true hypothesis. 

There are three elements of narrative : action, characters, 
and setting. In any conceivable story, one of these elements 
must be more important than the others. Stevenson always 
directed the attention of the reader to that element of narra- 
tive which was necessarily predominant. In certain of his 
stories the emphasis was cast on the element of setting. 
"I'll give you an example" — said R. L. S. to Mr. Graham 
Balfour — " The Merry Men, There I began with the feeling 



122 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

of one of those islands on the west coast of Scotland, and I 
gradually developed the story to express the sentiment with 
which that coast affected me." In this particular narrative, 
the reader is afforded a detailed description of the Isle of 
Earraid; but Stevenson never set forth a detailed description 
unless it was demanded by the exigencies of the tale. 

In most of his narratives, the predominating element is 
action, and the secondary element is character. In these 
stories, he permits the reader to see only those details of 
setting that are required for the business of the action or for 
the elucidation of the characters. If a man has to light a 
candle, there must be a candle; if the candle has to burn 
steadily, there must be no wind; and so on. If David Bal- 
four has to lose his purse in a crowded street, he must have 
a crowded street to lose it in: hence the description of Rotter- 
dam, with its streets "thronged with wild-like, outlandish 
characters." But — in any story of action or of character — 
to describe a city or a room for the mere sake of describing 
it seemed to Stevenson a waste of time and a diseconomy 
of attention. 

In other words, his use of setting is entirely utilitarian. 
For the foreground of his most typical narrations, he was 
contented — in the phrase of old Dumas — with "four boards, 
two actors, and a passion." For the background, he painted 
in only those details that were indispensable to the conduct 
of the action. The Master of Ballantrae and his brother, 
Mr. Henry, had to have a house in which to quarrel and a 
wood in which to fight a duel. Two swords had to hang 
upon the wall, because two swords were needed for the action. 
The season, and the weather, and the hour of the day must 



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THE BRENNER PASS 



"On the return from Italy, in 1863, Louis was 
driven through the Brenner Pass and subse- 
quently saw the Murgthal in Baden. So vivid 
was his recollection of these mountain regions 
that, though he never visited either the Murg- 
thal or the Brenner Pass again, he was able to 
combine his impressions of the two in the land- 
scape setting of Will o the Mill, which was 
written in Edinburgh, fourteen years later." — 
Page 108. 



THE REST OF EUROPE 123 

be fit to the occasion: "a windless stricture of frost" must 
"bind the air." But the teller of the tale deemed it utterly 
superfluous to describe particularities of landscape or of 
architecture that might be admired for exactness by special 
students of the place and period of the story. 

Hence, the paucity of description in the chapters of 
Catriona that are set in Holland was determined not by 
Stevenson's lack of intimate acquaintance with the country, 
but by his resolute determination not to allow his scenery to 
distract attention from his actors, in passages in which he 
had determined that the actors themselves should hold the 
centre of the stage. Anybody who has spent three days in 
Ley den could describe the city; but who else but R. L. S. 
could analyze all the subtle implications of that quarrel over 
" a copy of Heineccius " ? It is not always the business of an 
historical novelist to write history; it is more frequently his 
business to write a novel. 

In visiting any foreign country, Stevenson seldom saw 
anything else than what, for his own purposes as an artist, 
he needed to see. "A line of windmills birling in the 
breeze " sufficed him for a hundred pages of Catriona. More 
cultured travellers might devote a week to studying the 
paintings of Franz Hals in Haarlem; but he was Tusitala — 
the teller of tales. 



Chapteb Six 
THE UNITED STATES 



J 



CHAPTER SIX 
THE UNITED STATES 



Stevenson saw nothing of New York on the occasion of his 
first coming to America. At 6 p. m. on Sunday, August 18th, 
1879, he disembarked from the second cabin of the S. S. 
Devonia, which had sailed from the Clyde on August 7th. 
His sole impulsion at the time was that of "stepping west- 
ward"; and he remained in the metropolis only twenty-three 
hours before crossing to Jersey City to take the train that 
was to carry him across the plains. Under the circumstances, 
he felt no desire to explore a city that seemed, at a glance, 
to have ''an air of Liverpool." 

Louis left the Devonia in the company of a fellow-traveller 
named Jones; and an account of their adventures is rendered 
in the final chapter of The Amateur Emigrant — the only 
passage in the works of R. L. S. that bears the simple caption 
of "New York." From this chapter the following quota- 
tions may be called to the remembrance of the reader: 

Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting on some straw in the bot- 
tom of an open baggage-wagon. It rained miraculously; and from that 
moment till on the following night I left New York, there was scarce a 
lull, and no cessation of the downpour. ... It took us but a few 
minutes, though it cost a good deal of money, to be rattled along West 
Street to our destination: "Reunion House, No. 10 West Street, one 

127 



128 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

minute's walk from Castle Garden, the Steamboat Landings, California 
Steamers and Liverpool Ships; Board and Lodging per day 1 dollar, 
single meals 25 cents; no charge for storage or baggage; satisfaction guar- 
anteed to all persons; Michael Mitchell, Proprietor." Reunion House 
was, I may go the length of saying, a humble hostelry. You entered 
through a long bar-room, thence passed into a little dining-room, and 
thence into a still smaller kitchen. The furniture was of the plainest; 
but the bar was hung in the American taste, with encouraging and hos- 
pitable mottoes. ... I suppose we had one of the "private rooms 
for families" at Reunion House. It was very small, furnished with a 
bed, a chair, and some clothes-pegs; and it derived all that was necessary 
for the life of the human animal through two borrowed hghts; one looking 
into the passage, and the second opening, without sash, into another 
apartment, where three men fitfully snored, or, in intervals of wakeful- 
ness, drearily mumbled to each other all night long. . . . You had 
to pass through the rain, which still fell thick and resonant, to reach a 
lavatory on the other side of the court. There were three basin-stands, 
and a few crumpled towels and pieces of wet soap, white and shppery 
like fish; nor should I forget a looking-glass and a pair of questionable 
combs. . . . Those who are out of pocket may go safely to Reunion 
House, where they will get decent meals and find an honest and obUging 
landlord. 

Reunion House was still extant in the spring of 1895, when 
it was visited by a friend of the present writer, Mr. Louis 
Evan Shipman, who pubHshed his record of this visit in The 
Bookbuyer, for February, 1896. Some years ago, however, 
this landmark for literary pilgrims ceased to be. The site is 
now covered by the Whitehall Building — a skyscraper thirty- 
two stories high. The nearest edifice that dates from Steven- 
son's day is No. 16 West Street. This is a tenement house, 
four stories in height, built of red brick, with rusty iron fire- 
escapes dangling down the front. The street level is occu- 
pied by a cheap Greek restaurant. Beside the window of 
this restaurant, a dirty doorway admits the investigator, 
through a dingy passage, to a darkling inner court that ap- 



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THE UNITED STATES 129 

pears predestined toenshrine^a pair of questionable combs." 
Nothing could be more characteristic of the transitional New 
York of the present time than the ridiculous contrast be- 
tween the shabby and crumbling house at No. 16 West 
Street and the superb erection that adjoins it. To recon- 
struct the block as it appeared to R. L. S. it is necessary to 
imagine the Whitehall Building into non-existence, and to 
recreate a No. 10 in harmony with the aspect of the No. 16 
that is still permitted to exist to-day. It is possible to imag- 
ine the astonishment of R. L. S. — if he could return to- 
morrow to seek the clothes that he abandoned "as they lay 
in a pulp in the middle of a pool upon the floor of Mitchell's 
kitchen" — to find himself confronted, on the site of his Re- 
union House, by a superb and soaring ofiice building, while 
all the rest of his remembered West Street remained as dingy 
and depressing as of yore. 

The single day of Monday, August 19th, 1879, was spent by 
R. L. S. in *' nightmare wanderings in New York"; but these 
wanderings were motivated by immediate practical necessi- 
ties, and not by any desire to see the city. " I went to banks, 
post-ofiices, railway-ofiices, restaurants, publishers, book- 
sellers, money-changers" — he tells us — "and wherever I 
went, a pool would gather about my feet, and those who 
were careful of their floors would look on with an unfriendly 
eye." 

A legend still persists that, during the course of this tur- 
bulent day, Stevenson turned up in the offices of the Century 
Magazine, and tried to sell some manuscripts, and was po- 
litely shown the door because of his incongruous appearance. 
To put this rumour at rest, I wish to state that, some years 



130 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

ago, I took occasion to question the late Mr. Richard Watson 
Gilder very closely on this point, and that he assured me 
that there was absolutely no foundation for the legend. 

II 

The entire truth of that Great Adventure which allured 
Louis all the way from Grez to San Francisco has never yet 
been set before the reading public. The time has not yet 
come for telling all that is understood upon this subject by 
three or four people still living in the world; but, now that 
Louis has been dead for twenty years and Mrs. Stevenson 
has also passed away, a totally disinterested writer of a 
younger generation may perhaps be pardoned for lifting a 
single little corner of the veil which has been permitted for so 
many years to shroud in mystery this particular and all- 
important chapter of Stevenson's experience. 

The very title of The Amateur Emigrant has led the ma- 
jority of readers to infer that Louis came to America in the 
second cabin and crossed the plains in an emigrant train, 
mainly for the sake of the adventure and for the purpose of 
securing copy for his writings; and his love story has been 
told in terms that have reduced it to the sentimental im- 
becility of those romances that are approved as highly proper 
in boarding-schools for girls. 

Let us now consider frankly a few of the facts. Stevenson 
met Mrs. Osbourne at Grez in the summer of 1876. Their 
union — to repeat a previous statement in these pages — was 
immediate and complete. It was not, however, till nearly 
three years later that Mrs. Osbourne found it necessary to 
return to California, to secure a divorce from her husband, 



THE UNITED STATES 131 

from whom she had previously parted, by mutual consent, 
because of incompatibility of temper. When Stevenson in- 
formed his intimate friends of his intention to follow Mrs. 
Osbourne to California and to marry her as soon as her di- 
vorce had been decreed, they endeavoured to dissuade him 
from the project. The grounds for their opinion of the case 
may now, perhaps, be stated clearly. 

Stevenson's project was to marry a woman twelve years 
older than himself, with two children in their teens. His 
assurance that she was the one woman in the world decreed 
by destiny to be his mate was, not unnaturally, discounted 
by those who, at the moment, knew him best. To put the 
matter somewhat crudely, they had heard him say the same 
sort of thing so many times before that they were a little im- 
patient of his protestations. 

The history of Stevenson's relations with women in his 
youth has never yet been written. It has been stated — and 
stated truthfully — ^by his biographers that, in his growing 
years in Edinburgh, he was less interested than the average 
young man by women of his own age and of his own class. 
A famous Scottish man of letters — whose name I do not feel 
at liberty to mention — ^has assured me that, during his early 
twenties, Louis proposed marriage to two ladies who be- 
longed to his own circle in Edinburgh. One of these ladies 
I have never seen. The other I have met; but, of course, I 
never questioned her upon the subject. If the information 
of my credible authority is not at fault, it seems most reason- 
able to infer that both of these rejected proposals were mo- 
tivated by the impulse of the moment and represented no 
very profound feeling in the youthful suitor. One point, at 



132 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

least, is certain — that Louis, in his adolescence, was not ac- 
customed, as the phrase is, to keep company with young 
women of his own aristocratic circle. 

At the same time, as every one in Edinburgh knows, al- 
though this fact has hitherto been expunged from all biog- 
raphies of R. L. S., Louis was habituated to a dangerous and 
fitful intimacy with many women of a class inferior to his 
own. In common with many people who are afflicted with 
a tendency to tuberculosis, he was troubled, throughout his 
adolescence, with a superfluity of sexual impulsion. His 
early quarrel with his father, and the consequent cutting 
down of his allowance, was occasioned not merely by a disa- 
greement concerning the theory of religion, but also — and a 
little more emphatically — by the elder Stevenson's desire to 
curb what seemed to him the inexcusable and devastating 
wildness of his son. 

These facts of Stevenson's early struggle between the 
two natures that were forever warring within him were, of 
course, known fully to those who loved him best and cared 
most about his future, during the second half of the third 
decade of his life. His entanglement with Mrs. Osbourne 
appeared, therefore, to his best friends at the moment 
merely as another misadventure from which — as so often in 
the past — he needed imperatively to be rescued. In this 
inference his friends were wrong, as all of them [save one] 
admitted subsequently, when they met the lady in the case; 
but their opposition to the infatuation that appeared, at the 
time, to threaten a tragic termination to the promising career 
of R. L. S. can no longer be regarded as illogical. 

In persisting in his determination to marry Mrs. Osbourne, 



THE UNITED STATES 133 

Louis could expect no sympathy from his strictly minded 
father; and to brave the disapproval of his father was to ren- 
der inevitable a discontinuance of that parental subsidy 
which theretofore had descended like manna from the skies 
as his sole means of support. This practical consideration 
afforded his best friends a secondary motive for urging him 
to discontinue a relation whose cost seemed, upon its face, 
to overweigh its value. In a world in which, for Louis, there 
had been so many women, most of whom had been forgotten 
without pangs, it seemed quixotic and superfluous to sacrifice 
so much for one who figured, in the outlook of his most ex- 
perienced and sage advisers, merely as the latest factor in a 
still unfinished series. 

But Louis, this time, knew his mind. He had been taught 
at last what he had never learned before^ — although he had 
read it in Walt Whitman — that "the soul is not more than 
the body and the body is not more than the soul." He had 
learned at last to reconcile the sheer spirituality that he had 
experienced in his friendship with a woman like Mrs. Sitwell 
with the sheer sensuality that he had experienced in his re- 
lations with many women whose names are not recorded in 
the story of his growing up. For the first time in his life 
he realized a reconciliation of those apparent inconsistencies 
that are the necessary parents of the strange, miraculous 
phenomenon known to philosophic criticism by the name of 
*' modern love," and could say, with the greatest lyric cele- 
brant of this phenomenon, "Thy soul I know not from thy 
body, nor thee from myself, neither our love from God." 

It was this impulsion that moved in the mind of R. L. S. 
when he determined to cut himself off from his father to 



134 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

follow Mrs. Osbourne to America. His last night in England 
was spent in the home of Mr. Edmund Gosse. Mr. Gosse 
has told me personally how, for hours, he reasoned with 
Louis, in an endeavour to deter him from what seemed, at 
the time, to be a mad determination. To put an end to the 
discussion, R. L. S. finally brought forward certain argu- 
ments to prove that, if he should decide to stay at home, he 
would write himself forever, in the books of the Recording 
Angel, as a coward and a cad. Thereupon, Mr. Gosse, 
changing his tactics, endeavoured to advance a loan of 
money to his friend; but this loan was firmly refused by an 
idealist who preferred to embark penniless upon his Great 
Adventure. 

Another detail of these days was revealed to me by the 
late Alison Cunningham. She told me that Louis slunk 
away, without a word, from Swanston Cottage, in the early 
morning; and that his father never learned whither he had 
vanished until, a month later, he received a communication 
sent by Louis from New York. Cummy, at this time, was 
a very old woman, and I did not always trust the accuracy of 
her recollection of events long past; but she repeated this 
assertion several times, without any variation of detail, 
during the days I spent with her in Edinburgh, in the sum- 
mer of 1910. 

The poverty experienced by R. L. S. on his trip to Cali- 
fornia in 1879 was a matter of grim reality, and not at all a 
matter of romance. His reason for taking passage in the 
second cabin was not — as Mr. Balfour has suggested — "a 
desire to gain first-hand knowledge for himself of emigrants 
and emigration, which might be of immediate use for mak- 




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THE UNITED STATES 135 

ing a book and of ultimate service to him in a thousand 
ways." He travelled in the second cabin because, by cut- 
ting himself off from his father, he had made himself a pau- 
per; and he chose the second cabin in preference to the 
steerage, merely in order that he might have a table on 
which to write for money while the ship was at sea. This 
convenience he utilized for composing The Story of a Lie. 

His crossing of the continent in an emigrant train was dic- 
tated, also, not by the desire to gather copy for a subsequent 
book, but by the immediate necessity for strict economy. 
Louis had made a wager against the Providence that had 
coddled him throughout his youth; and the stakes were life 
and death. Though he had never earned his living in all 
his thirty years of life, he had determined at last to do so, in 
order to establish his economic fitness to assume the burden 
of a marriage toward which he felt himself impelled by a 
sublime and rare conjunction of desire and duty. In this 
endeavour to become — at a single, unanticipated impulse — 
self-supporting, he ultimately failed; but he embarked upon 
it with a bravery that must be recorded to his everlasting 
credit. The horrors of Reunion House were turned to hu- 
mour in the last chapter of The Amateur Emigrant; but, in 
actuality, they were borne with gritted teeth by a nameless 
author who, at the moment, was husbanding his small re- 
sources for a final and decisive battle against oblivion and 

death. 

Ill 

Stevenson's account of his experiences in the second cabin 
of the S. S. Devonia is rendered in The Amateur Emigrant; 
and the story is continued in the long essay entitled Across 



136 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

the Plains, which records his adventures in the emigrant 
train that, departing from Jersey City on August 19th, 
finally deposited him in San Francisco on August 30th, 
1879. 

I regret to say that I have never been to California. At 
one time or another I have personally visited all the im- 
portant places that thus far have been mentioned in these 
pages; but, like many other natives of New York, I have al- 
ways found it easier to cross the ocean than to cross the con- 
tinent, and have studied nearly all the European countries 
before studying my own. I make this personal statement 
in explanation of a necessary lack of fulness in my tracing 
of the trail of Stevenson through California. I do not care 
to waste the reader's time by writing second-hand descrip- 
tions of places I have never seen, nor am I willing merely to 
repeat what has been said before. For this reason, I shall 
do no more than summarize the essential facts of Stevenson's 
experience of California, in order that the reader may not be 
required to overleap a hiatus in the record now presented. 

Almost immediately after his arrival in San Francisco — 
where he was met, of course, by Mrs. Osbourne — Stevenson 
proceeded to "an angora goat ranche, in the Coast Line 
Mountains, eighteen miles from Monterey." Here he re- 
mained, in a condition of physical collapse, for two or three 
weeks. Subsequently, from the middle of September to the 
middle of December, he lived in Monterey, ''the old Pacific 
capital" — a place described particularly in an essay ap- 
pended to Across the Plains, Here he wrote The Amateur 
Emigrant, the essays on Thoreau and Yoshida Torajiro, and 
The Pavilion on the Links, began a novel — destined after- 



THE UNITED STATES 137 

ward to be discarded — entitled A Vendetta in the West, and 
planned Prince Otto. 

Shortly before Christmas, Stevenson returned to San 
Francisco, where he rented a room in a cheap lodging-house 
kept by Mrs. Mary Carson, at No. 608 Bush Street. This 
three-story wooden tenement was torn down several years 
before the earthquake. For three months Louis lived in 
almost utter solitude and abject penury. On December 
26th he wrote to Sidney Colvin: "For four days I have 
spoken to no one but to my landlady or landlord or to res- 
taurant waiters. This is not a gay way to pass Christmas, is 
it? And I must own, the guts are a little knocked out of me." 
He adopted a regime that reduced his daily expenditure for 
food to forty-five cents. The restaurant which he fre- 
quented is no longer in existence. Indeed, the only haunt of 
Stevenson at this period of his career that may still be visited 
by pilgrims is Portsmouth Square — in which, owing to the 
initiative of Mr. Bruce Porter, was erected the first monu- 
ment "to remember Robert Louis Stevenson" that was set 
up anywhere in the world. 

His impressions of San Francisco were recorded in the es- 
say entitled A Modern Cosmopolis, and were subsequently 
utilized as the basis for several chapters of The Wrecker. 
Chapter VIII of The Wrecker, entitled Faces on the City 
Front, details, beneath a thin disguise of fiction, the first 
meeting of Stevenson with the late Charles Warren Stod- 
dard, the author of Summer Cruising in the South Seas, who, 
with the possible exception of the late Virgil Williams, the 
founder of the California School of Art, became his best 
friend in California. 



138 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

Immediately after Stevenson's death, Stoddard pub- 
lished, in Kate Field's Washington, an essay in which he re- 
corded the following impression of R. L. S.: "His was a su- 
perior organization that seems never to have been tainted by 
things common or unclean; one more likely to be revolted 
than appealed to by carnality in any form." Lest this 
statement, emanating from a personal friend of R. L. S., 
should be accepted as authoritative by posterity, it seems to 
me desirable, in the interest of that utter understanding that 
is the aim and end of criticism, to set beside it, without com- 
ment, a statement made by R. L. S. himself, in a letter to 
Sir Sidney Colvin, written at 608 Bush Street, San Francisco, 
in February, 1880: "I have been all my days a dead hand at 
a harridan. I never saw the one yet that could resist me. 
When I die of consumption, you can put that upon my tomb." 

Stevenson did little writing in San Francisco, because his 
first experience of the pinch of poverty was depressing not 
only to his health, but also to his spirits. The manuscript of 
The Amateur Emigrant, which he had dispatched from Mon- 
terey, seemed disappointing both to Henley and to Colvin. 
They told him so, because they cared about his work; but 
their critical disapproval struck him as a blow, because it 
seemed to dash his hopes of ever earning his living, like many 
lesser writers, by a desperate plying of the pen. He pro- 
tested to Colvin, in a letter sent from San Francisco, in the 
month of May — "The second part was written in a circle of 
hell unknown to Dante — that of the penniless and dying 
author." So complete had been his failure to support him- 
self without assistance that he was reduced at last to a mood 
by no means natural to him nor characteristic of the usual 



THE UNITED STATES 139 

complexion of his mind — ^that mood of self-pity which is 
nearly as ignominious as the useless and unforgivable emo- 
tion of remorse. But in May, 1880, he received a telegram 
fromhis father which read, " Count on 250 pounds annually." 
Then his spirits rose again, and he renounced his losing fight 
against conditions that many lesser men have mastered. 

Despite the critical disapproval of Colvin, The Amateur 
Emigrant had been set up in type, because of Stevenson's 
need for instant funds. It was now, at once, withheld from 
publication. The elder Stevenson objected to a book that 
would acquaint the public with the fact that an only son of 
parents well-to-do in Edinburgh had been required to travel 
half way around the world as a common emigrant. With 
money supplied by Thomas Stevenson, the book was bought 
back from the prospective publishers; and it was not ulti- 
mately issued till after the death of R. L. S. Across the 
Plains had been conceived originally as a second section of 
The Amateur Emigrant; and it was only because of the sum- 
mary suppression of the first section that it was published 
without a prelude in 1892. 

Mrs. Osbourne having secured her divorce, and Stevenson 
having become reconciled with his father, the two were 
married on May 19th, 1880. The ceremony was performed 
by a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Dr. Scott, at his 
house on Sutter Street, near his church in Union Square. 
No one else was present at the wedding, except Mrs. Scott 
and Mrs. Virgil Williams. 

Immediately after the marriage, Stevenson — who at the 
time was in a state of utter physical exhaustion — was taken 
by his wife to a deserted mining camp on the slope of Mount 



140 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

Saint Helena, in the Californian Coast Range, fifty miles 
north from San Francisco. A detailed account of this ad- 
venture is rendered in The Silverado Squatters, which was 
subsequently written at Davos and Hyeres. 

Louis remained for more than two months at the Silverado 
mine in Calistoga; and during this time he recovered his 
health. His next desire was to take his wife and stepson 
back to Scotland. He sailed from New York on August 7th, 
and was met at Liverpool by his parents and Sir Sidney Col- 
vin on August 17th. On the occasion of this transit he 
spent only a few hours in New York, and saw no one in these 
hours — ^not even his old friend, Mr. Will H. Low, who was 
secluded at the moment in Nantucket. Indeed, this occa- 
sion can scarcely be recorded, in any real sense, as a visit to 
NewYorkbyR.L.S. 



IV 

Stevenson's second arrival in America was very different 
from his first. Instead of a nameless emigrant trundling 
in a baggage-wagon to a cheap lodging-house in West Street, 
he was now a famous personage, besieged by reporters, lion- 
ized and lauded as the author of Kidnapped and Treasure 
Island and (most of all) the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and 
Mr. Hyde. He had sailed from London on the S.S. Ludgate 
Hill, on August 21st, 1887, and had landed on September 7th. 
He remained overnight at a hotel in New York — probably 
the Victoria, at Broadway and Twenty-Seventh Street, 
though I have never been able to verify this information 
absolutely. The very next day, Thursday, September 8th, 
he was taken to Newport by Mr. and Mrs. Charles Fairchild. 




PRESENT APPEARANCE OF NO. 10 WEST STREET, NEW 
YORK, AS SEEN FROM THE HUDSON RIVER 



"Nothing could be more characteristic of the 
transitional New York of the present time than 
the ridiculous contrast between the shabby and 
crumbling house at No. 16 West Street and the 
superb erection that adjoins it. . , . It is 
possible to imagine the astonishment of R. L. S. 
— if he could return to-morrow — to find himself 
confronted, on the site of his Reunion House, by 
a superb and soaring oflSce-building, while all the 
rest of his remembered West Street remained 
as dingy and depressing as of yore." — Page 129. 



THE UNITED STATES 141 

Those of us who love the south shore of New England are 
grateful for this little glimpse of it described by Louis in a 
letter to Sir Sidney Colvin: '* A journey like fairyland for the 
most engaging beauties, one little rocky and pine-shaded 
cove after another, each with a house and a boat at anchor, 
so that I left my heart in each and marvelled why American 
authors had been so unjust to their country." 

A severe cold that Louis caught upon this journey laid 
him low, and he was required to remain in bed throughout 
the fortnight of his visit to the Fairchilds. For this reason 
he saw nothing of Newport — a place which otherwise would 
surely have impressed him because of his fondness for rocky 
coasts and wide vistas of the sea. 

It was while Stevenson was lying abed in Newport that 
Richard Mansfield gave his first performance in New York 
of Mr. T. Russell Sullivan's dramatization of Dr, Jekyll and 
Mr, Hyde, at the Madison Square Theatre, on Monday eve- 
ning, September 12th. Stevenson's wife and mother wit- 
nessed the performance from Mr. Sullivan's box. Louis 
himself, however, never saw the play. In this connection 
it may be added that, although all four of the plays that 
Stevenson wrote in collaboration with William Ernest Hen- 
ley have been acted at one time or another, Louis never saw 
a performance nor even a rehearsal of any of his scenes. 

On his return to New York, toward the end of September, 
Stevenson was introduced by his old friend, Mr. Will H. 
Low, to Mr. Charles Scribner and Mr. E. L. Burlingame and 
also to the late Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who began at this 
time his sketches for the famous medallion of R. L. S. 
Louis was now required to endure, for the first time in his 



142 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

life, that humorous discomfiture that is so strangely coveted 
by those who never have attained it — the discomfiture of 
being famous. He had to hide himself from interviewers and 
from lion-hunters; and he was soon bewildered by enterpris- 
ing publishers who were striving to outbid each other for his 
services. Until this time he had been unable to support 
himself without assistance from his father; but now, at the 
age of thirty-seven, he found himself discovered by America. 



On October 3rd, 1887, Stevenson arrived at Saranac Lake 
in the Adirondack Mountains; and here he remained until 
April 16th, 1888. The six and a half months of his residence 
in the Adirondacks constitute the most productive period of 
Stevenson's career in the United States. Before leaving 
New York, he had agreed with Mr. E. L. Burlingame to 
write a series of twelve essays, to appear month by month 
throughout the year in Scribner's Magazine. For this ser- 
vice he was paid $300 per number, or $3,500 for the dozen 
contributions: on this point I have questioned Mr. Burlin- 
game, and he has assured me that these figures are correct. 
As such payments are computed nowadays, it will be noticed 
that Stevenson's honorarium amounted approximately to 
five cents per word. There are many, many writers in 
America to-day, whose names appear in no wise destined to 
go thundering down the ages, who are accustomed to receive 
a larger recompense than this. Rates have risen since 1887; 
and writers, as well as plumbers and ditch-diggers, are now 
paid in accordance with a higher scale of wages than was 
accepted thirty years ago. Mr. Burlingame has assured me 



THE UNITED STATES 143 

that his payment to R. L. S. was far in excess of the usual 
rate in 1887; and the Messrs. Scribner, therefore, should be 
pardoned for paying no more than five cents per word for 
an everlasting masterpiece like the essay on The Lantern 
Bearers, 

To Stevenson himself the payment seemed excessive; and 
it was not without misgiving that, at the age of thirty-seven, 
he embarked upon his very first adventure in preparing copy 
once a month for a magazine that always had to go to press 
upon a certain date. To many other writers this harrowing 
necessity has become a second nature at the age of twenty- 
five; but in Stevenson's case the wonder is that he managed 
to confront so manfully that perennial recurrence of a 
dagger at the throat. Among the essays that he wrote at 
Saranac, to comply with the conditions of his contract, were 
many of the finest works of his career. Pulvis et Umbra, for 
example, which — despite the disapproval of so eminent a 
critic, so impressive a protestant, and so persuasive a friend 
as Sir Sidney Colvin — I still persist in regarding as Steven- 
son's greatest single piece of writing, was prepared at this 
time for Mr. Burlingame; and the series included also such 
immortal essays as The Lantern Bearers and A Christmas 
Sermon. 

From the scenery of Saranac itself, Stevenson derived his 
inspiration for the final chapters of The Master of Ballantrae. 
These chapters were subsequently written at Honolulu, in 
accordance with his lifelong custom of describing places at a 
distance; but the entire tale was conceived at Saranac, under 
circumstances recorded in the posthumous essay on The 
Genesis of the Master of Ballantrae, and the early chapters of 



144 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

the book — which dealt with his remembered Scotland — were 
written before he left the Adirondacks. At the same period 
Stevenson revised the manuscript of The Wrong Box, which 
had been drafted in entirety at Saranac by his stepson, Mr. 
Osbourne. 

The settlement at Saranac Lake is now famous as a resort 
for invalids afflicted with tuberculosis. In Stevenson's time 
the town was less developed than it is to-day: the railway, 
for instance, was not carried through to Saranac till the very 
year when Louis was installed there. Stevenson said of the 
aspect of the place, in a letter to his cousin Bob, ''The whole 
scene is very Highland, bar want of heather and the wooden 
houses"; and to Mr. Edmund Gosse he wrote, "We have a 
house in the eye of many winds, with a view of a piece of 
running water — Highland, all but the dear hue of peat — and 
of many hills — Highland also, but for the lack of heather." 
The justness of these two descriptions will be recognized at 
once by all who are equally familiar with the Scottish High- 
lands and the Adirondacks; and any new description of the 
essential aspects of the Adirondack wilderness would be 
superfluous to readers of The Master of Ballantrae. 

In the Christmas season of 1911-1912, I made a special 
trip to Saranac Lake for the purpose of interviewing those 
of the inhabitants that still remembered R. L. S. Louis had 
lived at "Baker's" — "a house upon a hill, and very jolly in 
every way." "Baker's" is a wooden cottage situated at the 
summit of a knoll a little to the northward of the village, and 
offering from its veranda a wide vista of the mountains. It 
appeared that when the Stevensons had rented this cottage, 
the owner, Mrs. Baker, had not moved away, but had con- 



THE UNITED STATES 145 

tinued to reside in a single little room under the same roof. 
I was therefore doubly interested in meeting Mrs. Baker, who 
had seen R. L. S. every day for nearly seven months at a 
time when he was writing many of his greatest essays. In 
answer to my first question concerning Stevenson's habits at 
this period, the worthy Mrs. Baker told me that he always 
smoked cigarettes in bed and burned holes in the sheets. 
For two hours I continued to talk in my most engaging 
manner, endeavouring every now and then to surprise Mrs. 
Baker into some other spontaneous and unconscious revela- 
tion; but, every time that I paused for a reply, she merely 
told me once again that Louis would burn holes in the sheets 
and that nothing could be done about it. He liked to stay 
in bed; he never stayed in bed without smoking cigarettes ; he 
dropped the ashes on the sheets; the sheets were full of holes; 
and . . . that was all that she remembered of Robert 
Louis Stevenson. . . . There are many morals to this 
little anecdote, and he who runs may read them. 

I enjoyed a very different conversation with Dr. Ed- 
ward L. Trudeau, who served as Stevenson's physician 
throughout the winter that Louis spent at Saranac. This 
memorable man has lived and worked at Saranac for over 
forty years. He is himself afflicted with tuberculosis, and 
has been afflicted ever since his early twenties. In this 
desolate, inhospitable settlement — w^here the cold, dry air is 
favourable to consumptives — he has fought for nearly half a 
century against the disease that has hollowed his own cheeks 
and interjected a discomfortable heave and wheezing of the 
voice between his eager phrases. Scientifically, he is the 
foremost living student of tuberculosis in America. Single- 



146 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

handed he has founded a City of the Sick, which sits with 
touching wistfulness upon a mountainside, where the 
stricken [Hke himself] recHne eight hours daily in the frigid 
and recuperative air of out of doors. In his laboratory he 
has cultivated and examined the tuberculosis germ, and 
tested its effects on animals. For years and years he has 
been fighting to defeat it, toiling all the time under sentence 
of death from its insidious assaults. 

Dr. Trudeau received me on an isolated upper veranda 
of his house. He was reclining in a steamer-chair — as is the 
custom in this community of consumptives — wrapped up in 
many furs and with his head swaddled in a furry cap. He 
is an aquiline, emaciated man, with a fine profile accentuated 
by deeply sculptured cheeks, a scrubby brown moustache 
[his hair I could not see], slender, fine, and eager hands, and 
a resonant, enthusiastic voice. 

I had come to ask of R. L. S., and I remained to admire 
this hero of innumerable, unnoted battles — this maker of a 
City of the Sick, who, because of him, now look more hope- 
fully on each successive rising of the sun. We talked, of 
course, of Louis. It became evident that during the winter 
that Stevenson spent at Saranac he was in what the doctor 
called "an arrested state" of tuberculosis. He did not suf- 
fer at that time from any active symptoms. The disease, 
which undoubtedly he had experienced before, no longer 
really troubled him. He was still physically weak, but not 
dangerously nor even uncomfortably ill. His state, instead 
of interrupting work, negatively helped it by excluding in- 
terruptions. At this point the reader may be reminded that 
the professional testimony of Dr. Trudeau agrees with 



THE UNITED STATES 147 

the impression of Stevenson's illness that was derived by 
Mr. Henry James at Bournemouth. 

Stevenson at Saranac was, as usual, a dare-devil — accord- 
ing to the report that Dr. Trudeau gave me. He did 
what he wanted to do, regardless of consequences. It was 
bad for him to smoke; but he smoked cigarettes incessantly, 
one after another, rolling them as he sat up in bed and puffing 
at them as he wrote. 

Louis was, as always, active, eager, and tempestuous in 
conversation. A topic started, he would leap up from his 
chair, and, pacing the unhomely living-room of the Baker 
Cottage, would argue, preach, and fight, sawing the air with 
violent wavings of the hands. Once there was an argument 
concerning the respective merits of the systems of trans- 
mitting luggage on British and American railways. Dr. 
Trudeau reminded Stevenson that, whereas in England it 
was necessary that the traveller should personally superin- 
tend the transfer of his luggage at every change of cars, in 
America he could check his trunks through from New York 
to San Francisco and never think of them again. Louis, the 
canny and deftly dodging acrobat, took refuge in a verbal 
subterfuge. "Checks," he cried, "checks: an American can 
do nothing without them : he cannot even die without pass- 
ing in his checks." 

Stevenson hated illness and displayed a childish aversion 
toward any serious preoccupation with disease. Dr. Tru- 
deau could never persuade him to inspect his growing sani- 
tarium on the mountainside. A day or two after Louis had 
finished The Lantern Bearers, Dr. Trudeau led him into his 
laboratory, showed him the diminutive tubercular bacillus 



148 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

growing in a test tube, and talked to him about his own vast 
dream of defeating the disease. Louis was merely disgusted 
and annoyed. "Trudeau," said he, "you are carrying a 
lantern at your belt, but the oil has a most objectionable 
smell." 

The doctor told me this with humour; but it did not seem 
to me so funny when I thought about it afterward. At pres- 
ent I remember an eager, active-minded man, sitting an- 
chored in a lounging chair and muffled among furs; talking 
with that tense voice of the achieving dreamer; at home in 
life, though exiled from its laughing and delightful common- 
places; cheerful and alert, though slowly dying; young, clear- 
eyed, and still enthusiastic, although already ancient in 
endurance; lying invalided while his City of the Sick grows 
yearly to greater prominence among the pines ; fighting with 
an easy smile the death that has so long besieged him, to the 
end that others after him, afflicted similarly, may not die. 
And the best of our tricky and trivial achievements in setting 
words together dwindle in my mind to indistinction beside 
the labours and the spirit of this man. 

VI 

On April 16th, 1888, Stevenson left Saranac Lake, consider- 
ably helped in health, and returned to New York City. His 
presence in the metropolis was confided to only a few people; 
and much of his time was spent in bed, not because of illness, 
but merely because this habit contributed to his seclusion. 
Saint-Gaudens, moreover, was sketching him in bed for the 
medallion. 

At this time Louis lived for two weeks at the Hotel St. 



THE UNITED STATES 149 

Stephen's, in East Eleventh Street, near University Place. 
This hotel was not unnoted in its day; it was, for instance, 
the residing-place of Mrs. Jefferson Davis for several years 
after the Civil War. After Stevenson's time it became in- 
corporated with the Hotel Albert, which stands immediately 
adjacent to it at the corner of University Place. At a still 
later period the building of the Hotel St. Stephen's was 
abandoned. It is still standing; but it has been vacant for 
several years, and its deserted and decadent aspect is of 
little interest to the literary pilgrim. No one now resident 
at the Hotel Albert was there in 1888, and no record of Ste- 
venson's stay has been retained in the archives of the office. 
I have talked with several people who called upon R. L. S. 
at the Hotel St. Stephen's. Mr. John S. Phillips and Mr. 
Oliver Herford have both transmitted the impression of a 
certain incongruity between his habit of sitting up in bed 
and the energy and vigour of his personality. Louis spent 
nearly an entire afternoon on a bench in Washington Square 
conversing with Mark Twain; and NeW Yorkers who desire 
to trace his very footsteps may also be informed, on the 
authority of Mr. Herford, that Stevenson frequented the 
old Cafe Martin at the corner of University Place and 

Ninth Street. 

VII 

At the beginning of May [the exact date, according to his 
mother's diary, was April 30th], Stevenson went to Manas- 
quan. New Jersey, a resort that had been recommended to 
him by Mr. Will H. Low. Here he remained for a month, 
until a telegram from San Francisco told him that his wife, 
who was visiting in California, had discovered that the 



150 ON THE TRAIL OF STEVENSON 

schooner-yacht Casco might be hired for a cruise in the 
Pacific. Mr. Low was with him when the telegram arrived. 
"What will you do?" was his query; and the answer came at 
once, "Go, of course." 

The Manasquan River, as it approaches the sea, broadens 
out to a lagoon which separates Manasquan itself from 
Point Pleasant. Beside the river, nearly two miles inland 
from the dunes that hedge the ocean, was situated the Union 
House where Louis lived. The Stevenson family had the 
place entirely to themselves, because the regular season for 
summer boarders did not begin till June. Louis took many 
long walks, and enjoyed sailing in a catboat navigated by 
his stepson. It was at Manasquan that Saint-Gaudens 
modelled the hands for his medallion; and Mr. Low, who 
saw a great deal of Louis at this period, has recorded several 
conversations at Manasquan in a charming chapter of his 
Chronicle of Friendships. 

Till very lately, visitors to Manasquan were shown the 
room on the second story of the Union House which was 
Stevenson's final residence "in our part of the country." 
Recently, however, this old-fashioned, quiet, quaint hotel 
was almost entirely destroyed by fire, and America lost one 
of her few remaining landmarks associated intimately with 
the life of R. L. S. 

VIII 

Stevenson returned to New York on May 28th and ar- 
rived in San Francisco on June 7th. He remained at the 
Occidental Hotel in Montgomery Street — which was de- 
stroyed in the conflagration that resulted from the great earth- 



THE UNITED STATES 151 

quake of 1906 — until the Casco was fitted out for her cruise. 
The contemplated trip among the South Sea Islands had 
been financed by Mr. S. S. McClure, who was able to offer 
Stevenson the sum of ten thousand dollars for a series of 
travel letters to be published in a syndicate of newspapers. 
Louis was so impressed by the enterprise and by the person- 
ality of Mr. McClure that he later used him as a model for 
the character of Jim Pinkerton in The Wrecker. 

The Casco was towed outside the harbour of San Francisco 
in the early hours of June 28th, 1888. Little did any one 
imagine at the time that Louis was destined never to set 
foot again in Europe or America. It was a long trail from 
the Golden Gate to the summit of Vaea Mountain. 

This trail I have not followed. I cannot lead the reader 
"up the Road of Loving Hearts, 'on a wonderful clear night 
of stars,' to meet the man coming toward us on a horse." 
In the diary of every traveller, the best-beloved places are 
those that are still to seek. But it is good to remember 
always that Vailima is only half the world away, and that 
some day we may see the Isle of Upolu arising from the sea. 
As Louis said in El Dorado, "There is always a new horizon 
for onward-looking men; and although we dwell on a small 
planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond 
a brief period of years, we are so constituted that . . . 
the term of hoping is prolonged until the term of life." 



THE END 




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